Efficient fusion network with label generation and branch transformations for visible and infrared images fusion

The information obtained from a single sensor is often insufficient for accurate environmental perception. In contrast, multi-sensor fusion significantly enhances perceptual accuracy, with the integration of infrared and visible light sensors being one of the most common approaches in multi-sensor fusion. Infrared and visible image fusion aims to combine the texture details of visible images with the thermal radiation information of infrared images to produce fused images with enhanced visual quality, which find broad applications in night vision, surveillance, and target detection. Existing fusion methods primarily focus on improving the quality of fused images, often at the expense of computational efficiency due to the reliance on complex, multi-layered architectures. This limitation makes them unsuitable for deployment on low-power terminal devices. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel image fusion framework, termed TSFusion, which leverages teacher-student learning to achieve both high-quality fusion and high computational efficiency. A teacher network, equipped with sequence-model-based feature extraction blocks and progressive integration modules, generates high-quality fusion labels by overcoming the limited receptive field of conventional convolutional networks. The lightweight student network adopts a reparameterisation-based Fast Inception Module, ensuring robust fitting capabilities while maintaining high-speed operation. Additionally, a novel multi-scale loss function is introduced to guide the student network in learning from the teacher at both semantic and pixel levels. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TSFusion framework achieves superior visual and quantitative performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, TSFusion exhibits exceptional inference speed, outperforming all existing fusion algorithms, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. The implementation of TSFusion is publicly available at https://github.com/UAVSwarm/TSFusion.