IRPol-Fuse: Energy-structure coordination for infrared polarization fusion under low visibility
This work addresses the limitation of existing infrared-polarization image fusion methods, which overly rely on infrared information under low-visibility conditions, thereby sacrificing polarization texture details. To overcome this, the authors propose IRPol-Fuse, a novel framework that employs an energy-structure collaborative strategy to jointly preserve infrared thermal saliency and polarization structural details. The framework integrates three key components: polarization attention fusion, infrared highlight injection, and polarization texture injection. Additionally, the study introduces LI-PI, the first infrared-polarization benchmark dataset tailored for low-visibility concealed scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IRPol-Fuse significantly enhances thermal target preservation, structural detail recovery, and visual naturalness on both the LI-PI and LDDRS datasets. The effectiveness of the fused images is further corroborated by improved performance in downstream object detection tasks.