P2Fusion: Prompt-based Progressive Infrared-Visible Image Fusion via Dual-Prior Distillation
This work addresses the distortion in infrared and visible image fusion caused by inherent modality discrepancies and the limitations of existing methods that rely on static constraints or external priors while neglecting intrinsic modality characteristics. To this end, we propose a dual-intrinsic-prompt distillation framework that transforms thermal saliency and spatial quality priors into learnable dynamic prompts. Our approach enables decoupled and adaptive modality-specific feature fusion through a Teach-to-Fuse dual-granularity progressive guidance mechanism and a Gated Dynamic Expert Recalibration (GDER) module. The method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five benchmark datasets, outperforming competitors in 14 out of 20 evaluation metrics, and significantly enhances downstream object detection—improving mAP by 3.2%, 0.5%, and 0.9% on MSRS, M3FD, and DroneVehicle, respectively.