Bridging Human Evaluation to Infrared and Visible Image FusionJinyuan Liu, Xingyuan Li, Qingyun Mei et al.
Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) integrates complementary modalities to enhance scene perception. Current methods predominantly focus on optimizing handcrafted losses and objective metrics, often resulting in fusion outcomes that do not align with human visual preferences. This challenge is further exacerbated by the ill-posed nature of IVIF, which severely limits its effectiveness in human perceptual environments such as security surveillance and driver assistance systems. To address these limitations, we propose a feedback reinforcement framework that bridges human evaluation to infrared and visible image fusion. To address the lack of human-centric evaluation metrics and data, we introduce the first large-scale human feedback dataset for IVIF, containing multidimensional subjective scores and artifact annotations, and enriched by a fine-tuned large language model with expert review. Based on this dataset, we design a domain-specific reward function and train a reward model to quantify perceptual quality. Guided by this reward, we fine-tune the fusion network through Group Relative Policy Optimization, achieving state-of-the-art performance that better aligns fused images with human aesthetics. Code is available at https://github.com/ALKA-Wind/EVAFusion.
Striving for Faster and Better: A One-Layer Architecture with Auto Re-parameterization for Low-Light Image EnhancementNan An, Long Ma, Guangchao Han et al.
Deep learning-based low-light image enhancers have made significant progress in recent years, with a trend towards achieving satisfactory visual quality while gradually reducing the number of parameters and improving computational efficiency. In this work, we aim to delving into the limits of image enhancers both from visual quality and computational efficiency, while striving for both better performance and faster processing. To be concrete, by rethinking the task demands, we build an explicit connection, i.e., visual quality and computational efficiency are corresponding to model learning and structure design, respectively. Around this connection, we enlarge parameter space by introducing the re-parameterization for ample model learning of a pre-defined minimalist network (e.g., just one layer), to avoid falling into a local solution. To strengthen the structural representation, we define a hierarchical search scheme for discovering a task-oriented re-parameterized structure, which also provides powerful support for efficiency. Ultimately, this achieves efficient low-light image enhancement using only a single convolutional layer, while maintaining excellent visual quality. Experimental results show our sensible superiority both in quality and efficiency against recently-proposed methods. Especially, our running time on various platforms (e.g., CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP) consistently moves beyond the existing fastest scheme. The source code will be released at https://github.com/vis-opt-group/AR-LLIE.