HDDGAN: A Heterogeneous Dual-Discriminator Generative Adversarial Network for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to preserve thermal radiation information from infrared images while integrating texture details from visible images, enabling the capture of important features and hidden details of subjects in complex scenes and disturbed environments. Consequently, IVIF offers distinct advantages in practical applications such as video surveillance, night navigation, and target recognition. However, prevailing methods often face challenges in simultaneously capturing thermal region features and detailed information due to the disparate characteristics of infrared and visible images. Consequently, fusion outcomes frequently entail a compromise between thermal target area information and texture details. In this study, we introduce a novel heterogeneous dual-discriminator generative adversarial network (HDDGAN) to address this issue. Specifically, the generator is structured as a multi-scale skip-connected structure, facilitating the extraction of essential features from different source images. To enhance the information representation ability of the fusion result, an attention mechanism is employed to construct the information fusion layer within the generator, leveraging the disparities between the source images. Moreover, recognizing the distinct learning requirements of information in infrared and visible images, we design two discriminators with differing structures. This approach aims to guide the model to learn salient information from infrared images while simultaneously capturing detailed information from visible images. Extensive experiments conducted on various public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed HDDGAN over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms, highlighting its enhanced potential for practical applications.