Degradation-Robust Fusion: An Efficient Degradation-Aware Diffusion Framework for Multimodal Image Fusion in Arbitrary Degradation Scenarios

2026-04-10Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors address problems in combining images that are blurry, noisy, or low quality by proposing a new method that improves existing image fusion techniques. Unlike typical diffusion models that predict noise, their approach directly outputs the combined image, which helps handle different types of image problems more efficiently. They also introduce a way to adjust the process so it respects both the original degraded images and the fusion goals. Their experiments show their method works well across various difficult image fusion situations.

image fusiondiffusion modelsdegradationdenoisingneural networksnoiseblurlow resolutionimage reconstruction
Authors
Yu Shi, Yu Liu, Zhong-Cheng Wu, Juan Cheng, Huafeng Li, Xun Chen
Abstract
Complex degradations like noise, blur, and low resolution are typical challenges in real world image fusion tasks, limiting the performance and practicality of existing methods. End to end neural network based approaches are generally simple to design and highly efficient in inference, but their black-box nature leads to limited interpretability. Diffusion based methods alleviate this to some extent by providing powerful generative priors and a more structured inference process. However, they are trained to learn a single domain target distribution, whereas fusion lacks natural fused data and relies on modeling complementary information from multiple sources, making diffusion hard to apply directly in practice. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an efficient degradation aware diffusion framework for image fusion under arbitrary degradation scenarios. Specifically, instead of explicitly predicting noise as in conventional diffusion models, our method performs implicit denoising by directly regressing the fused image, enabling flexible adaptation to diverse fusion tasks under complex degradations with limited steps. Moreover, we design a joint observation model correction mechanism that simultaneously imposes degradation and fusion constraints during sampling to ensure high reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on diverse fusion tasks and degradation configurations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method under complex degradation scenarios.