CFNet: An infrared and visible image compression fusion network

Image fusion aims to acquire a more complete image representation within a limited physical space to more effectively support practical vision applications. Although the currently popular infrared and visible image fusion algorithms take practical applications into consideration. However, they did not fully consider the redundancy and transmission efficiency of image data. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a compression fusion network for infrared and visible images based on joint CNN and Transformer, termed CFNet. First of all, the idea of variational autoencoder image compression is introduced into the image fusion framework, achieving data compression while maintaining image fusion quality and reducing redundancy. Moreover, a joint CNN and Transformer network structure is proposed, which comprehensively considers the local information extracted by CNN and the global long-distance dependencies emphasized by Transformer. Finally, multi-channel loss based on region of interest is used to guide network training. Not only can color visible and infrared images be fused directly but more bits can be allocated to the foreground region of interest, resulting in a superior compression ratio. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses affirm that the proposed compression fusion algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, rate-distortion performance experiments demonstrate the great advantages of the proposed algorithm for data storage and transmission. The source code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoxing0503/CFNet.