# Unsupervised Misaligned Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Cross-Modality Image Generation and Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11876/

## Key facts

- Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [Residual Dense Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10477/) (2018)
- [DenseFuse: A Fusion Approach to Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08361/) (2018)
- [EnhanceNet: Single Image Super-Resolution Through Automated Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07919/) (2016)
- [Investigating Bi-Level Optimization for Learning and Vision from a Unified Perspective: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11517/) (2021)
- [An Unsupervised Learning Model for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02604/) (2018)
- [Fast and Accurate Image Super-Resolution with Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01992/) (2017)
- [RFN-Nest: An end-to-end residual fusion network for infrared and visible images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04286/) (2021)
- [RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-Identification via Joint Pixel and Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05839/) (2019)
- [DIDFuse: Deep Image Decomposition for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09210/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Modal Image Registration via Geometry Preserving Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08073/) (2020)
- [A General Descent Aggregation Framework for Gradient-based Bi-level Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07976/) (2021)
- [Learning Deformable Image Registration from Optimization: Perspective, Modules, Bilevel Training and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14557/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning based Inter-Modality Image Registration Supervised by Intra-Modality Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10735/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06840/) (2023)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [Equivariant Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11443/) (2023)
- [Text-IF: Leveraging Semantic Text Guidance for Degradation-Aware and Interactive Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16387/) (2024)
- [CoCoNet: Coupled Contrastive Learning Network with Multi-level Feature Ensemble for Multi-modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10960/) (2022)
- [Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12494/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal Gated Mixture of Local-to-Global Experts for Dynamic Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01392/) (2023)
- [A Task-guided, Implicitly-searched and Meta-initialized Deep Model for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15862/) (2023)
- [Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10761/) (2025)
- [Image Fusion via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02235/) (2024)
- [An Interactively Reinforced Paradigm for Joint Infrared-Visible Image Fusion and Saliency Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09999/) (2023)
- [Every SAM Drop Counts: Embracing Semantic Priors for Multi-Modality Image Fusion and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01210/) (2025)
- [Text-DiFuse: An Interactive Multi-Modal Image Fusion Framework based on Text-modulated Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23905/) (2024)
- [Boosting Few-shot Fine-grained Recognition with Background Suppression and Foreground Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01439/) (2022)
- [Learning a Graph Neural Network with Cross Modality Interaction for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03256/) (2023)
- [Bi-level Dynamic Learning for Jointly Multi-modality Image Fusion and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06720/) (2023)
- [PAIF: Perception-Aware Infrared-Visible Image Fusion for Attack-Tolerant Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03979/) (2023)
- [Task-driven Image Fusion with Learnable Fusion Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03240/) (2024)
- [DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01187/) (2025)
- [E2E-MFD: Towards End-to-End Synchronous Multimodal Fusion Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09323/) (2024)
- [Improving Misaligned Multi-modality Image Fusion with One-stage Progressive Dense Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11165/) (2023)
- [MaeFuse: Transferring Omni Features with Pretrained Masked Autoencoders for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11016/) (2024)
- [Efficient Rectified Flow for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16549/) (2025)
- [Conditional Controllable Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01573/) (2024)
- [Searching a Compact Architecture for Robust Multi-Exposure Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12236/) (2023)
- [TSJNet: A Multi-modality Target and Semantic Awareness Joint-driven Image Fusion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01212/) (2024)
- [Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Language-Driven Loss in CLIP Embedding Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16267/) (2024)
- [Graph Reasoning Transformer for Image Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09545/) (2022)
- [UMCFuse: A Unified Multiple Complex Scenes Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02096/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent learning-based image fusion methods have marked numerous progress in pre-registered multi-modality data, but suffered serious ghosts dealing with misaligned multi-modality data, due to the spatial deformation and the difficulty narrowing cross-modality discrepancy. To overcome the obstacles, in this paper, we present a robust cross-modality generation-registration paradigm for unsupervised misaligned infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF). Specifically, we propose a Cross-modality Perceptual Style Transfer Network (CPSTN) to generate a pseudo infrared image taking a visible image as input. Benefiting from the favorable geometry preservation ability of the CPSTN, the generated pseudo infrared image embraces a sharp structure, which is more conducive to transforming cross-modality image alignment into mono-modality registration coupled with the structure-sensitive of the infrared image. In this case, we introduce a Multi-level Refinement Registration Network (MRRN) to predict the displacement vector field between distorted and pseudo infrared images and reconstruct registered infrared image under the mono-modality setting. Moreover, to better fuse the registered infrared images and visible images, we present a feature Interaction Fusion Module (IFM) to adaptively select more meaningful features for fusion in the Dual-path Interaction Fusion Network (DIFN). Extensive experimental results suggest that the proposed method performs superior capability on misaligned cross-modality image fusion.