# MoCTEFuse: Illumination-Gated Mixture of Chiral Transformer Experts for Multi-Level Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20180/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [GShard: Scaling Giant Models with Conditional Computation and Automatic Sharding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16668/) (2020)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Scaling Vision with Sparse Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05974/) (2021)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (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)
- [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)
- [DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06840/) (2023)
- [Drone-based RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Vehicle Detection via Uncertainty-Aware Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02437/) (2020)
- [Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02097/) (2023)
- [MMRotate: A Rotated Object Detection Benchmark using PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13317/) (2022)
- [LRRNet: A Novel Representation Learning Guided Fusion Network for Infrared and Visible Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05172/) (2023)
- [Improving Multispectral Pedestrian Detection by Addressing Modality Imbalance Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03043/) (2020)
- [Go Wider Instead of Deeper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11817/) (2021)
- [MDLatLRR: A novel decomposition method for infrared and visible image fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02291/) (2018)
- [Multi-modal Gated Mixture of Local-to-Global Experts for Dynamic Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01392/) (2023)
- [Phase-Shifting Coder: Predicting Accurate Orientation in Oriented Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06368/) (2022)
- [Low-Light Image Enhancement with Illumination-Aware Gamma Correction and Complete Image Modelling Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08220/) (2023)
- [IAIFNet: An Illumination-Aware Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14997/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While illumination changes inevitably affect the quality of infrared and visible image fusion, many outstanding methods still ignore this factor and directly merge the information from source images, leading to modality bias in the fused results. To this end, we propose a dynamic multi-level image fusion network called MoCTEFuse, which applies an illumination-gated Mixture of Chiral Transformer Experts (MoCTE) to adaptively preserve texture details and object contrasts in balance. MoCTE consists of high- and low-illumination expert subnetworks, each built upon the Chiral Transformer Fusion Block (CTFB). Guided by the illumination gating signals, CTFB dynamically switches between the primary and auxiliary modalities as well as assigning them corresponding weights with its asymmetric cross-attention mechanism. Meanwhile, it is stacked at multiple stages to progressively aggregate and refine modality-specific and cross-modality information. To facilitate robust training, we propose a competitive loss function that integrates illumination distributions with three levels of sub-loss terms. Extensive experiments conducted on the DroneVehicle, MSRS, TNO and RoadScene datasets show MoCTEFuse's superior fusion performance. Finally, it achieves the best detection mean Average Precision (mAP) of 70.93% on the MFNet dataset and 45.14% on the DroneVehicle dataset. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Bitlijinfu/MoCTEFuse.