# FusionVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder for RGB Image Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [NVAE: A Deep Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03898/) (2020)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [Importance Weighted Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.00519/) (2015)
- [PixelCNN++: Improving the PixelCNN with Discretized Logistic Mixture Likelihood and Other Modifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05517/) (2017)
- [Autoencoding beyond pixels using a learned similarity metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.09300/) (2015)
- [Recent Advances in Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.07108/) (2015)
- [DenseFusion: 6D Object Pose Estimation by Iterative Dense Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04780/) (2019)
- [Joint 3D Proposal Generation and Object Detection from View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02294/) (2017)
- [Ladder Variational Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.02282/) (2016)
- [Very Deep VAEs Generalize Autoregressive Models and Can Outperform Them on Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10650/) (2020)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)
- [DRAW: A Recurrent Neural Network For Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.04623/) (2015)
- [DenseFuse: A Fusion Approach to Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08361/) (2018)
- [Variational Lossy Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02731/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [LUT-Fuse: Towards Extremely Fast Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Distillation to Learnable Look-Up Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00346/) (2025)
- [Bi-directional Self-Registration for Misaligned Infrared-Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06920/) (2025)
- [Integrative Variational Autoencoders for Generative Modeling of an Image Outcome with Multiple Input Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02734/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sensor fusion can significantly improve the performance of many computer vision tasks. However, traditional fusion approaches are either not data-driven and cannot exploit prior knowledge nor find regularities in a given dataset or they are restricted to a single application. We overcome this shortcoming by presenting a novel deep hierarchical variational autoencoder called FusionVAE that can serve as a basis for many fusion tasks. Our approach is able to generate diverse image samples that are conditioned on multiple noisy, occluded, or only partially visible input images. We derive and optimize a variational lower bound for the conditional log-likelihood of FusionVAE. In order to assess the fusion capabilities of our model thoroughly, we created three novel datasets for image fusion based on popular computer vision datasets. In our experiments, we show that FusionVAE learns a representation of aggregated information that is relevant to fusion tasks. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms traditional methods significantly. Furthermore, we present the advantages and disadvantages of different design choices.