# MMA-UNet: A Multi-Modal Asymmetric UNet Architecture for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17747 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17747/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [YOLOv7: Trainable bag-of-freebies sets new state-of-the-art for real-time object detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02696/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Misaligned Infrared and Visible Image Fusion via Cross-Modality Image Generation and Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11876/) (2022)
- [MSeg3D: Multi-modal 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08600/) (2023)
- [Task-Customized Mixture of Adapters for General Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12494/) (2024)
- [Dif-Fusion: Towards High Color Fidelity in Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08072/) (2023)
- [MDLatLRR: A novel decomposition method for infrared and visible image fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02291/) (2018)
- [An Interactively Reinforced Paradigm for Joint Infrared-Visible Image Fusion and Saliency Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09999/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Bridging the Gap between Multi-focus and Multi-modal: A Focused Integration Framework for Multi-modal Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01886/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FlexiD-Fuse: Flexible number of inputs multi-modal medical image fusion based on diffusion model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09456/) (2025)
- [AWM-Fuse: Multi-Modality Image Fusion for Adverse Weather via Global and Local Text Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16881/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal image fusion (MMIF) maps useful information from various modalities into the same representation space, thereby producing an informative fused image. However, the existing fusion algorithms tend to symmetrically fuse the multi-modal images, causing the loss of shallow information or bias towards a single modality in certain regions of the fusion results. In this study, we analyzed the spatial distribution differences of information in different modalities and proved that encoding features within the same network is not conducive to achieving simultaneous deep feature space alignment for multi-modal images. To overcome this issue, a Multi-Modal Asymmetric UNet (MMA-UNet) was proposed. We separately trained specialized feature encoders for different modal and implemented a cross-scale fusion strategy to maintain the features from different modalities within the same representation space, ensuring a balanced information fusion process. Furthermore, extensive fusion and downstream task experiments were conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of MMA-UNet in fusing infrared and visible image information, producing visually natural and semantically rich fusion results. Its performance surpasses that of the state-of-the-art comparison fusion methods.