MAFS: Masked Autoencoder for Infrared-Visible Image Fusion and Semantic Segmentation

Infrared-visible image fusion methods aim at generating fused images with good visual quality and also facilitate the performance of high-level tasks. Indeed, existing semantic-driven methods have considered semantic information injection for downstream applications. However, none of them investigates the potential for reciprocal promotion between pixel-wise image fusion and cross-modal feature fusion perception tasks from a macroscopic task-level perspective. To address this limitation, we propose a unified network for image fusion and semantic segmentation. MAFS is a parallel structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a segmentation sub-network. On the one hand, we devise a heterogeneous feature fusion strategy to enhance semantic-aware capabilities for image fusion. On the other hand, by cascading the fusion sub-network and a segmentation backbone, segmentation-related knowledge is transferred to promote feature-level fusion-based segmentation. Within the framework, we design a novel multi-stage Transformer decoder to aggregate fine-grained multi-scale fused features efficiently. Additionally, a dynamic factor based on the max-min fairness allocation principle is introduced to generate adaptive weights of two tasks and guarantee smooth training in a multi-task manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Abraham-Einstein/MAFS/.