MCADFusion: a novel multi-scale convolutional attention decomposition method for enhanced infrared and visible light image fusion

This paper presents a method called MCADFusion, a feature decomposition technique specifically designed for the fusion of infrared and visible images, incorporating target radiance and detailed texture. MCADFusion employs an innovative two-branch architecture that effectively extracts and decomposes both local and global features from different source images, thereby enhancing the processing of image feature information. The method begins with a multi-scale feature extraction module and a reconstructor module to obtain local and global feature information from rich source images. Subsequently, the local and global features of different source images are decomposed using the the channel attention module (CAM) and the spatial attention module (SAM). Feature fusion is then performed through a two-channel attention merging method. Finally, image reconstruction is achieved using the restormer module. During the training phase, MCADFusion employs a two-stage strategy to optimize the network parameters, resulting in high-quality fused images. Experimental results demonstrate that MCADFusion surpasses existing techniques in both subjective visual evaluation and objective assessment on publicly available TNO and MSRS datasets, underscoring its superiority.