Robust Fusion Controller: Degradation-aware Image Fusion with Fine-grained Language Instructions

Current image fusion methods struggle to adapt to real-world environments encompassing diverse degradations with spatially varying characteristics. To address this challenge, we propose a robust fusion controller (RFC) capable of achieving degradation-aware image fusion through fine-grained language instructions, ensuring its reliable application in adverse environments. Specifically, RFC first parses language instructions to innovatively derive the functional condition and the spatial condition, where the former specifies the degradation type to remove, while the latter defines its spatial coverage. Then, a composite control priori is generated through a multi-condition coupling network, achieving a seamless transition from abstract language instructions to latent control variables. Subsequently, we design a hybrid attention-based fusion network to aggregate multi-modal information, in which the obtained composite control priori is deeply embedded to linearly modulate the intermediate fused features. To ensure the alignment between language instructions and control outcomes, we introduce a novel language-feature alignment loss, which constrains the consistency between feature-level gains and the composite control priori. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our RFC is robust against various composite degradations, particularly in highly challenging flare scenarios.

Balancing Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation for Unified Image Fusion

Unified image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multi-source images, enhancing image quality through a unified framework applicable to diverse fusion tasks. While treating all fusion tasks as a unified problem facilitates task-invariant knowledge sharing, it often overlooks task-specific characteristics, thereby limiting the overall performance. Existing general image fusion methods incorporate explicit task identification to enable adaptation to different fusion tasks. However, this dependence during inference restricts the model's generalization to unseen fusion tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified image fusion framework named "TITA", which dynamically balances both Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation. For task-invariant interaction, we introduce the Interaction-enhanced Pixel Attention (IPA) module to enhance pixel-wise interactions for better multi-source complementary information extraction. For task-specific adaptation, the Operation-based Adaptive Fusion (OAF) module dynamically adjusts operation weights based on task properties. Additionally, we incorporate the Fast Adaptive Multitask Optimization (FAMO) strategy to mitigate the impact of gradient conflicts across tasks during joint training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TITA not only achieves competitive performance compared to specialized methods across three image fusion scenarios but also exhibits strong generalization to unseen fusion tasks.

CoMatch: Dynamic Covisibility-Aware Transformer for Bilateral Subpixel-Level Semi-Dense Image Matching

This prospective study proposes CoMatch, a novel semi-dense image matcher with dynamic covisibility awareness and bilateral subpixel accuracy. Firstly, observing that modeling context interaction over the entire coarse feature map elicits highly redundant computation due to the neighboring representation similarity of tokens, a covisibility-guided token condenser is introduced to adaptively aggregate tokens in light of their covisibility scores that are dynamically estimated, thereby ensuring computational efficiency while improving the representational capacity of aggregated tokens simultaneously. Secondly, considering that feature interaction with massive non-covisible areas is distracting, which may degrade feature distinctiveness, a covisibility-assisted attention mechanism is deployed to selectively suppress irrelevant message broadcast from non-covisible reduced tokens, resulting in robust and compact attention to relevant rather than all ones. Thirdly, we find that at the fine-level stage, current methods adjust only the target view's keypoints to subpixel level, while those in the source view remain restricted at the coarse level and thus not informative enough, detrimental to keypoint location-sensitive usages. A simple yet potent fine correlation module is developed to refine the matching candidates in both source and target views to subpixel level, attaining attractive performance improvement. Thorough experimentation across an array of public benchmarks affirms CoMatch's promising accuracy, efficiency, and generalizability.

ControlFusion: A Controllable Image Fusion Framework with Language-Vision Degradation Prompts

Current image fusion methods struggle to address the composite degradations encountered in real-world imaging scenarios and lack the flexibility to accommodate user-specific requirements. In response to these challenges, we propose a controllable image fusion framework with language-vision prompts, termed ControlFusion, which adaptively neutralizes composite degradations. On the one hand, we develop a degraded imaging model that integrates physical imaging mechanisms, including the Retinex theory and atmospheric scattering principle, to simulate composite degradations, thereby providing potential for addressing real-world complex degradations from the data level. On the other hand, we devise a prompt-modulated restoration and fusion network that dynamically enhances features with degradation prompts, enabling our method to accommodate composite degradation of varying levels. Specifically, considering individual variations in quality perception of users, we incorporate a text encoder to embed user-specified degradation types and severity levels as degradation prompts. We also design a spatial-frequency collaborative visual adapter that autonomously perceives degradations in source images, thus eliminating the complete dependence on user instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlFusion outperforms SOTA fusion methods in fusion quality and degradation handling, particularly in countering real-world and compound degradations with various levels.

VideoFusion: A Spatio-Temporal Collaborative Network for Mutli-modal Video Fusion and Restoration

Compared to images, videos better align with real-world acquisition scenarios and possess valuable temporal cues. However, existing multi-sensor fusion research predominantly integrates complementary context from multiple images rather than videos. This primarily stems from two factors: 1) the scarcity of large-scale multi-sensor video datasets, limiting research in video fusion, and 2) the inherent difficulty of jointly modeling spatial and temporal dependencies in a unified framework. This paper proactively compensates for the dilemmas. First, we construct M3SVD, a benchmark dataset with $220$ temporally synchronized and spatially registered infrared-visible video pairs comprising 153,797 frames, filling the data gap for the video fusion community. Secondly, we propose VideoFusion, a multi-modal video fusion model that fully exploits cross-modal complementarity and temporal dynamics to generate spatio-temporally coherent videos from (potentially degraded) multi-modal inputs. Specifically, 1) a differential reinforcement module is developed for cross-modal information interaction and enhancement, 2) a complete modality-guided fusion strategy is employed to adaptively integrate multi-modal features, and 3) a bi-temporal co-attention mechanism is devised to dynamically aggregate forward-backward temporal contexts to reinforce cross-frame feature representations. Extensive experiments reveal that VideoFusion outperforms existing image-oriented fusion paradigms in sequential scenarios, effectively mitigating temporal inconsistency and interference.

DSPFusion: Image Fusion via Degradation and Semantic Dual-Prior Guidance

Existing fusion methods are tailored for high-quality images but struggle with degraded images captured under harsh circumstances, thus limiting the practical potential of image fusion. This work presents a \textbf{D}egradation and \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{P}rior dual-guided framework for degraded image \textbf{Fusion} (\textbf{DSPFusion}), utilizing degradation priors and high-quality scene semantic priors restored via diffusion models to guide both information recovery and fusion in a unified model. In specific, it first individually extracts modality-specific degradation priors, while jointly capturing comprehensive low-quality semantic priors. Subsequently, a diffusion model is developed to iteratively restore high-quality semantic priors in a compact latent space, enabling our method to be over $20 \times$ faster than mainstream diffusion model-based image fusion schemes. Finally, the degradation priors and high-quality semantic priors are employed to guide information enhancement and aggregation via the dual-prior guidance and prior-guided fusion modules. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSPFusion mitigates most typical degradations while integrating complementary context with minimal computational cost, greatly broadening the application scope of image fusion.

MEET: A Million-Scale Dataset for Fine-Grained Geospatial Scene Classification with Zoom-Free Remote Sensing Imagery

Accurate fine-grained geospatial scene classification using remote sensing imagery is essential for a wide range of applications. However, existing approaches often rely on manually zooming remote sensing images at different scales to create typical scene samples. This approach fails to adequately support the fixed-resolution image interpretation requirements in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce the Million-scale finE-grained geospatial scEne classification dataseT (MEET), which contains over 1.03 million zoom-free remote sensing scene samples, manually annotated into 80 fine-grained categories. In MEET, each scene sample follows a scene-inscene layout, where the central scene serves as the reference, and auxiliary scenes provide crucial spatial context for finegrained classification. Moreover, to tackle the emerging challenge of scene-in-scene classification, we present the Context-Aware Transformer (CAT), a model specifically designed for this task, which adaptively fuses spatial context to accurately classify the scene samples. CAT adaptively fuses spatial context to accurately classify the scene samples by learning attentional features that capture the relationships between the center and auxiliary scenes. Based on MEET, we establish a comprehensive benchmark for fine-grained geospatial scene classification, evaluating CAT against 11 competitive baselines. The results demonstrate that CAT significantly outperforms these baselines, achieving a 1.88% higher balanced accuracy (BA) with the Swin-Large backbone, and a notable 7.87% improvement with the Swin-Huge backbone. Further experiments validate the effectiveness of each module in CAT and show the practical applicability of CAT in the urban functional zone mapping. The source code and dataset will be publicly available at https://jerrywyn.github.io/project/MEET.html.

HyperGCT: A Dynamic Hyper-GNN-Learned Geometric Constraint for 3D Registration

Geometric constraints between feature matches are critical in 3D point cloud registration problems. Existing approaches typically model unordered matches as a consistency graph and sample consistent matches to generate hypotheses. However, explicit graph construction introduces noise, posing great challenges for handcrafted geometric constraints to render consistency among matches. To overcome this, we propose HyperGCT, a flexible dynamic Hyper-GNN-learned geometric constraint that leverages high-order consistency among 3D correspondences. To our knowledge, HyperGCT is the first method that mines robust geometric constraints from dynamic hypergraphs for 3D registration. By dynamically optimizing the hypergraph through vertex and edge feature aggregation, HyperGCT effectively captures the correlations among correspondences, leading to accurate hypothesis generation. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, KITTI-LC, and ETH show that HyperGCT achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, our method is robust to graph noise, demonstrating a significant advantage in terms of generalization. The code will be released.

SpecDM: Hyperspectral Dataset Synthesis with Pixel-level Semantic Annotations

In hyperspectral remote sensing field, some downstream dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation (SS) and change detection (CD), rely on supervised learning to improve model performance and require a large amount of manually annotated data for training. However, due to the needs of specific equipment and special application scenarios, the acquisition and annotation of hyperspectral images (HSIs) are often costly and time-consuming. To this end, our work explores the potential of generative diffusion model in synthesizing HSIs with pixel-level annotations. The main idea is to utilize a two-stream VAE to learn the latent representations of images and corresponding masks respectively, learn their joint distribution during the diffusion model training, and finally obtain the image and mask through their respective decoders. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work to generate high-dimensional HSIs with annotations. Our proposed approach can be applied in various kinds of dataset generation. We select two of the most widely used dense prediction tasks: semantic segmentation and change detection, and generate datasets suitable for these tasks. Experiments demonstrate that our synthetic datasets have a positive impact on the improvement of these downstream tasks.

Text-DiFuse: An Interactive Multi-Modal Image Fusion Framework based on Text-modulated Diffusion Model

Existing multi-modal image fusion methods fail to address the compound degradations presented in source images, resulting in fusion images plagued by noise, color bias, improper exposure, \textit{etc}. Additionally, these methods often overlook the specificity of foreground objects, weakening the salience of the objects of interest within the fused images. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel interactive multi-modal image fusion framework based on the text-modulated diffusion model, called Text-DiFuse. First, this framework integrates feature-level information integration into the diffusion process, allowing adaptive degradation removal and multi-modal information fusion. This is the first attempt to deeply and explicitly embed information fusion within the diffusion process, effectively addressing compound degradation in image fusion. Second, by embedding the combination of the text and zero-shot location model into the diffusion fusion process, a text-controlled fusion re-modulation strategy is developed. This enables user-customized text control to improve fusion performance and highlight foreground objects in the fused images. Extensive experiments on diverse public datasets show that our Text-DiFuse achieves state-of-the-art fusion performance across various scenarios with complex degradation. Moreover, the semantic segmentation experiment validates the significant enhancement in semantic performance achieved by our text-controlled fusion re-modulation strategy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Leiii-Cao/Text-DiFuse.