ReFusion: Learning Image Fusion from Reconstruction with Learnable Loss via Meta-Learning

Image fusion aims to combine information from multiple source images into a single and more informative image. A major challenge for deep learning-based image fusion algorithms is the absence of a definitive ground truth and distance measurement. Thus, the manually specified loss functions aiming to steer the model learning, include hyperparameters that need to be manually thereby limiting the model's flexibility and generalizability to unseen tasks. To overcome the limitations of designing loss functions for specific fusion tasks, we propose a unified meta-learning based fusion framework named ReFusion, which learns optimal fusion loss from reconstructing source images. ReFusion consists of a fusion module, a loss proposal module, and a reconstruction module. Compared with the conventional methods with fixed loss functions, ReFusion employs a parameterized loss function, which is dynamically adapted by the loss proposal module based on the specific fusion scene and task. To ensure that the fusion network preserves maximal information from the source images, makes it possible to reconstruct the original images from the fusion image, a meta-learning strategy is used to make the reconstruction loss continually refine the parameters of the loss proposal module. Adaptive updating is achieved by alternating between inter update, outer update, and fusion update, where the training of the three components facilitates each other. Extensive experiments affirm that our method can successfully adapt to diverse fusion tasks, including infrared-visible, multi-focus, multi-exposure, and medical image fusion problems. The code will be released.