ATFusion: An alternate cross-attention transformer network for infrared and visible image fusion

The fusion of infrared and visible images is essential in remote sensing applications, as it combines the thermal information of infrared images with the detailed texture of visible images for more accurate analysis in tasks like environmental monitoring, target detection, and disaster management. The current fusion methods based on Transformer techniques for infrared and visible (IV) images have exhibited promising performance. However, the attention mechanism of the previous Transformer-based methods was prone to extract common information from source images without considering the discrepancy information, which limited fusion performance. In this paper, by reevaluating the cross-attention mechanism, we propose an alternate Transformer fusion network (ATFusion) to fuse IV images. Our ATFusion consists of one discrepancy information injection module (DIIM) and two alternate common information injection modules (ACIIM). The DIIM is designed by modifying the vanilla cross-attention mechanism, which can promote the extraction of the discrepancy information of the source images. Meanwhile, the ACIIM is devised by alternately using the vanilla cross-attention mechanism, which can fully mine common information and integrate long dependencies. Moreover, the successful training of ATFusion is facilitated by a proposed segmented pixel loss function, which provides a good trade-off for texture detail and salient structure preservation. The qualitative and quantitative results on public datasets indicate our ATFusion is effective and superior compared to other state-of-the-art methods.