MAUGIF: Mechanism-Aware Unsupervised General Image Fusion via Dual Cross-Image Autoencoders

TL;DR

MAUGIF introduces a mechanism-aware, unsupervised image fusion method using dual cross-image autoencoders, effectively handling diverse fusion tasks by modeling additive and multiplicative mechanisms, and demonstrating strong generalization across applications.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel dual autoencoder framework that explicitly models different fusion mechanisms, improving generality and interpretability in unsupervised image fusion.

Findings

Effective across multiple fusion tasks

Outperforms task-specific methods

Demonstrates strong generalization ability

Abstract

Image fusion aims to integrate structural and complementary information from multi-source images. However, existing fusion methods are often either highly task-specific, or general frameworks that apply uniform strategies across diverse tasks, ignoring their distinct fusion mechanisms. To address this issue, we propose a mechanism-aware unsupervised general image fusion (MAUGIF) method based on dual cross-image autoencoders. Initially, we introduce a classification of additive and multiplicative fusion according to the inherent mechanisms of different fusion tasks. Then, dual encoders map source images into a shared latent space, capturing common content while isolating modality-specific details. During the decoding phase, dual decoders act as feature injectors, selectively reintegrating the unique characteristics of each modality into the shared content for reconstruction. The modality-specific features are injected into the source image in the fusion process, generating the fused image that integrates information from both modalities. The architecture of decoders varies according to their fusion mechanisms, enhancing both performance and interpretability. Extensive experiments are conducted on diverse fusion tasks to validate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our method. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MAUGIF.