DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion
This addresses the need for stable and interpretable fusion methods in fields like medical imaging and surveillance, though it is incremental as it adapts existing diffusion models to a specific task.
The authors tackled the problem of multi-modality image fusion by proposing a denoising diffusion model (DDFM) that formulates fusion as conditional generation, resulting in high-quality fused images for infrared-visible and medical applications without requiring fine-tuning.
Multi-modality image fusion aims to combine different modalities to produce fused images that retain the complementary features of each modality, such as functional highlights and texture details. To leverage strong generative priors and address challenges such as unstable training and lack of interpretability for GAN-based generative methods, we propose a novel fusion algorithm based on the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). The fusion task is formulated as a conditional generation problem under the DDPM sampling framework, which is further divided into an unconditional generation subproblem and a maximum likelihood subproblem. The latter is modeled in a hierarchical Bayesian manner with latent variables and inferred by the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. By integrating the inference solution into the diffusion sampling iteration, our method can generate high-quality fused images with natural image generative priors and cross-modality information from source images. Note that all we required is an unconditional pre-trained generative model, and no fine-tuning is needed. Our extensive experiments indicate that our approach yields promising fusion results in infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/MMIF-DDFM}.