BTSFusion: Fusion of infrared and visible image via a mechanism of balancing texture and salience

In recent years, deep learning research has received significant attention in the field of infrared and visible image fusion. However, the issue of designing loss functions in deep learning-based image fusion methods has not been well-addressed. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel mechanism of utilizing traditional fusion methods as loss functions to guide the training of deep learning models. We incorporate the superior aspects of two traditional methods, namely Guided Filter (GF) and Latent Low-Rank Representation (LatLRR), into the design of the loss function, proposing a fusion method for infrared and visible images that balances both texture and saliency, termed BTSFusion. The proposed network is not only lightweight but also preserves the maximum amount of valuable information in source images. It is worth noting that the complexity of BTSFusion primarily lies in the design of the loss function, which allows it to remain an end-to-end network, as demonstrated by efficiency comparison experiments that highlight the excellent computational efficiency of our algorithm. Furthermore, through subjective observations and objective comparisons, we validated the performance of the proposed method by comparing it with twelve state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/YQ-097/BTSFusion.