Abstract
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to provide informative images by combining complementary information from different sensors. Existing IVIF methods based on deep learning focus on strengthening the network with increasing depth but often ignore the importance of transmission characteristics, resulting in the degradation of important information. In addition, while many methods use various loss functions or fusion rules to retain complementary features of both modes, the fusion results often retain redundant or even invalid information.In order to accurately extract the effective information from both infrared images and visible light images without omission or redundancy, and to better serve downstream tasks such as target detection with the fused image, we propose a multi-level structure search attention fusion network based on semantic information guidance, which realizes the fusion of infrared and visible images in an end-to-end way. Our network has two main contributions: the use of neural architecture search (NAS) and the newly designed multilevel adaptive attention module (MAAB). These methods enable our network to retain the typical characteristics of the two modes while removing useless information for the detection task in the fusion results. In addition, our loss function and joint training method can establish a reliable relationship between the fusion network and subsequent detection tasks. Extensive experiments on the new dataset (M3FD) show that our fusion method has achieved advanced performance in both subjective and objective evaluations, and the mAP in the object detection task is improved by 0.5% compared to the second-best method (FusionGAN).