Rethinking Few-Shot Image Fusion: Granular Ball Priors Enable General-Purpose Deep Fusion

In image fusion tasks, the absence of real fused images as priors presents a fundamental challenge. Most deep learning-based fusion methods rely on large-scale paired datasets to extract global weighting features from raw images, thereby generating fused outputs that approximate real fused images. In contrast to previous studies, this paper explores few-shot training of neural networks under the condition of having prior knowledge. We propose a novel fusion framework named GBFF, and a Granular Ball Significant Extraction algorithm specifically designed for the few-shot prior setting. All pixel pairs involved in the fusion process are initially modeled as a Coarse-Grained Granular Ball. At the local level, Fine-Grained Granular Balls are used to slide through the brightness space to extract Non-Salient Pixel Pairs, and perform splitting operations to obtain Salient Pixel Pairs. Pixel-wise weights are then computed to generate a pseudo-supervised image. At the global level, pixel pairs with significant contributions to the fusion process are categorized into the Positive Region, while those whose contributions cannot be accurately determined are assigned to the Boundary Region. The Granular Ball performs modality-aware adaptation based on the proportion of the positive region, thereby adjusting the neural network's loss function and enabling it to complement the information of the boundary region. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both the proposed algorithm and the underlying theory. Compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, our approach shows strong competitiveness in terms of both fusion time and image expressiveness. Our code is publicly available at: