mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

PID: Physics-Informed Diffusion Model for Infrared Image Generation

arXiv 2407.09299 ↗First posted 12 Jul 2024cs.CVcited by 17

On the map: Diffusion models → Image generation, text-to-image and editing

Abstract (arXiv)

Infrared imaging technology has gained significant attention for its reliable sensing ability in low visibility conditions, prompting many studies to convert the abundant RGB images to infrared images. However, most existing image translation methods treat infrared images as a stylistic variation, neglecting the underlying physical laws, which limits their practical application. To address these issues, we propose a Physics-Informed Diffusion (PID) model for translating RGB images to infrared images that adhere to physical laws. Our method leverages the iterative optimization of the diffusion model and incorporates strong physical constraints based on prior knowledge of infrared laws during training. This approach enhances the similarity between translated infrared images and the real infrared domain without increasing extra training parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that PID significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/fangyuanmao/PID.

Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 30 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2024.

Builds on

30 of 60 references.

Closest ancestors · 3

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024One-Step Image Translation with Text-to-Image Models18 Mar
  2. 2022BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models16 May
  3. 2022Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents13 Apr

Other references · 27

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  4. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,694
  5. 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
  6. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
  7. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  8. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,185
  9. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
  10. 2014Conditional Generative Adversarial Netscited by 2,152
  11. 2021Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinementcited by 1,506
  12. 2023Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 1,465
15 more
  1. 2021Cascaded Diffusion Models for High Fidelity Image Generationcited by 1,155
  2. 2021Variational Diffusion Modelscited by 1,145
  3. 2022Denoising Diffusion Restoration Modelscited by 951
  4. 2018Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 795
  5. 2023Adversarial Diffusion Distillationcited by 741
  6. 2020Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 727
  7. 2017Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networkscited by 602
  8. 2019Borrow from Anywhere: Pseudo Multi-modal Object Detection in Thermal Imagerycited by 38
  9. 2023Edge-guided Multi-domain RGB-to-TIR image Translation for Training Vision Tasks with Challenging Labelscited by 30
  10. 2023Explicitly Minimizing the Blur Error of Variational Autoencoderscited by 29
  11. 2018Synthetic data generation for end-to-end thermal infrared trackingcited by 26
  12. 2024StegoGAN: Leveraging Steganography for Non-Bijective Image-to-Image Translationcited by 18
  13. 2023Unleashing the Power of Self-Supervised Image Denoising: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 17
  14. 2021Preventing Oversmoothing in VAE via Generalized Variance Parameterizationcited by 15
  15. 2024Implicit Multi-Spectral Transformer: An Lightweight and Effective Visible to Infrared Image Translation Modelcited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 11.

17 papers.

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  1. 2025Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Surveycited by 24
  2. 2025DiffV2IR: Visible-to-Infrared Diffusion Model via Vision-Language Understandingcited by 16
  3. 2025ThermalGen: Style-Disentangled Flow-Based Generative Models for RGB-to-Thermal Image Translationcited by 13
  4. 2025F-ViTA: Foundation Model Guided Visible to Thermal Translationcited by 7
  5. 2026TherA: Thermal-Aware Visual-Language Prompting for Controllable RGB-to-Thermal Infrared Translationcited by 3
  6. 2025Inference-Time Scaling of Diffusion Models for Infrared Data Generationcited by 1
  7. 2026Few-Shot LoRA Adaptation of a Flow-Matching Foundation Model for Cross-Spectral Object Detectioncited by 1
  8. 2026Compositional Meta-Learning for Mitigating Task Heterogeneity in Physics-Informed Neural Networkscited by 1
  9. 2026TeX-1500: A Paired Real-World LWIR Hyperspectral Dataset and Benchmark for Temperature-Emissivity-Texture Decompositioncited by 1
  10. 2025ThermalDiffusion: Visual-to-Thermal Image-to-Image Translation for Autonomous Navigationcited by 0
  11. 2026Missing No More: Dictionary-Guided Cross-Modal Image Fusion under Missing Infraredcited by 0
  12. 2026UniPINN: A Unified PINN Framework for Multi-task Learning of Diverse Navier-Stokes Equationscited by 0
5 more
  1. 2026UniTriGen: Unified Triplet Generation of Aligned Visible-Infrared-Label for Few-Shot RGB-T Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  2. 2026SC-Diff: Semantically Calibrated Diffusion for Visible-to-Infrared Image Translationcited by 0
  3. 2026Training with synthetic data for drone detection in thermal imagerycited by 0
  4. 2026PhysWave: Physics-Guided Latent Diffusion Models for Controllable Spatial Audio Generationcited by 0
  5. 2026One Model, Two Worlds: Bidirectional Sonar-Optical Translationcited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024TC-PDM: Temporally Consistent Patch Diffusion Models for Infrared-to-Visible Video Translation
  2. 2024Diff-Mosaic: Augmenting Realistic Representations in Infrared Small Target Detection via Diffusion Prior
  3. 2025TIR-Diffusion: Diffusion-based Thermal Infrared Image Denoising via Latent and Wavelet Domain Optimization
  4. 2025DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution
  5. 2023Interpretable ODE-style Generative Diffusion Model via Force Field Construction
  6. 2026PI-Light: Physics-Inspired Diffusion for Full-Image Relighting
  7. 2024Taming Diffusion Models for Image Restoration: A Review
  8. 2023Dif-Fusion: Towards High Color Fidelity in Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Diffusion Models