# TextFusion: Unveiling the Power of Textual Semantics for Controllable Image Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14209 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14209/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Large-Scale Adversarial Training for Vision-and-Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06195/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Pixel-BERT: Aligning Image Pixels with Text by Deep Multi-Modal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00849/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [LLVIP: A Visible-infrared Paired Dataset for Low-light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10831/) (2021)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [DenseFuse: A Fusion Approach to Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08361/) (2018)
- [ManiGAN: Text-Guided Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06203/) (2019)
- [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)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [VinVL: Revisiting Visual Representations in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00529/) (2021)
- [RFN-Nest: An end-to-end residual fusion network for infrared and visible images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04286/) (2021)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [NestFuse: An Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Architecture based on Nest Connection and Spatial/Channel Attention Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00328/) (2020)
- [MDLatLRR: A novel decomposition method for infrared and visible image fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02291/) (2018)
- [OVTrack: Open-Vocabulary Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08408/) (2023)
- [TGFuse: An Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Approach Based on Transformer and Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10147/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Vision-and-Language Pre-training via Retrieval-based Multi-Granular Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00242/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [One Model for ALL: Low-Level Task Interaction Is a Key to Task-Agnostic Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19854/) (2025)
- [MaeFuse: Transferring Omni Features with Pretrained Masked Autoencoders for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Guided Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11016/) (2024)
- [Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Language-Driven Loss in CLIP Embedding Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16267/) (2024)
- [MMDRFuse: Distilled Mini-Model with Dynamic Refresh for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15641/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Disentanglement for Referring Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11496/) (2025)
- [SMLNet: A SPD Manifold Learning Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10679/) (2024)
- [Towards Unified Semantic and Controllable Image Fusion: A Diffusion Transformer Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07170/) (2025)
- [FusionRegister: Every Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Deserves Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07667/) (2026)
- [EvaNet: Towards More Efficient and Consistent Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02896/) (2026)
- [A Semantic-Aware and Multi-Guided Network for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06159/) (2024)
- [Distilling Textual Priors from LLM to Efficient Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07029/) (2025)
- [SMFusion: Semantic-Preserving Fusion of Multimodal Medical Images for Enhanced Clinical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12251/) (2025)
- [Revisiting RGBT Tracking Benchmarks from the Perspective of Modality Validity: A New Benchmark, Problem, and Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00168/) (2024)
- [One Latent Space to Rule All Degradations: Unifying Restoration Knowledge for Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07033/) (2025)
- [RLBayes: a Bayesian Network Structure Learning Algorithm via Reinforcement Learning-Based Search Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05167/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Few-Shot Image Fusion: Granular Ball Priors Enable General-Purpose Deep Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08937/) (2025)
- [TeSG: Textual Semantic Guidance for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16730/) (2025)
- [RIS-FUSION: Rethinking Text-Driven Infrared and Visible Image Fusion from the Perspective of Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12710/) (2025)
- [MSGFusion: Multimodal Scene Graph-Guided Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12901/) (2025)
- [Multi-Grained Text-Guided Image Fusion for Multi-Exposure and Multi-Focus Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20556/) (2025)
- [Entity-Guided Multi-Task Learning for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01870/) (2026)
- [Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15104/) (2026)
- [MIND: Multimodal Intent-Driven Network via Diffusion Transformers for Medical Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28565/) (2026)
- [Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00530/) (2026)
- [Right Answer, Wrong Heat: Explanation-Aware Evaluation and Thermal-Grounded Feedback for MLLMs on Infrared Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09145/) (2026)
- [IT-TextFusion: Iterative Text-Image Interaction with Text-Guided Residual Refinement for Degradation-Aware Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01092/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Advanced image fusion methods are devoted to generating the fusion results by aggregating the complementary information conveyed by the source images. However, the difference in the source-specific manifestation of the imaged scene content makes it difficult to design a robust and controllable fusion process. We argue that this issue can be alleviated with the help of higher-level semantics, conveyed by the text modality, which should enable us to generate fused images for different purposes, such as visualisation and downstream tasks, in a controllable way. This is achieved by exploiting a vision-and-language model to build a coarse-to-fine association mechanism between the text and image signals. With the guidance of the association maps, an affine fusion unit is embedded in the transformer network to fuse the text and vision modalities at the feature level. As another ingredient of this work, we propose the use of textual attention to adapt image quality assessment to the fusion task. To facilitate the implementation of the proposed text-guided fusion paradigm, and its adoption by the wider research community, we release a text-annotated image fusion dataset IVT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach (TextFusion) consistently outperforms traditional appearance-based fusion methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/TextFusion.