Probing Synergistic High-Order Interaction in Infrared and Visible Image Fusion
Authors: Naishan Zheng, Man Zhou, Jie Huang, Junming Hou, Haoying Li, Yuan Xu, Feng Zhao

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to generate a fused image by integrating and distinguishing complementary information from multiple sources. While the cross-attention mechanism with global spatial interactions appears promising it only capture second-order spatial interactions neglecting higher-order interactions in both spatial and channel dimensions. This limitation hampers the exploitation of synergies between multi-modalities. To bridge this gap we introduce a Synergistic High-order Interaction Paradigm (SHIP) designed to systematically investigate spatial fine-grained and global statistics collaborations between infrared and visible images across two fundamental dimensions: 1) Spatial dimension: we construct spatial fine-grained interactions through element-wise multiplication mathematically equivalent to global interactions and then foster high-order formats by iteratively aggregating and evolving complementary information enhancing both efficiency and flexibility. 2) Channel dimension: expanding on channel interactions with first-order statistics (mean) we devise high-order channel interactions to facilitate the discernment of inter-dependencies between source images based on global statistics. Harnessing high-order interactions significantly enhances our model's ability to exploit multi-modal synergies leading in superior performance over state-of-the-art alternatives as shown through comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks.