SpeciFuse: Learning Degradation-Type Specificity for Robust Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Under Composite Degradations

Abstract

Existing degradation-resistant infrared-visible image fusion methods struggle to effectively handle composite degradations, where multiple degradation types exhibit intricate coupling and mutual interference. To address this challenge, we propose SpeciFuse, an infrared-visible image fusion network that learns degradation-specific representations. By explicitly modeling the specificity of individual degradations through a siamese architecture trained on single-degradation data, our method effectively addresses the conflicts arising from multiple degradations, thereby achieving robust fusion performance that generalizes to diverse composite degradation scenarios. In SpeciFuse, a degradation-type specificity decoupling module is designed to disentangle the feature representations by attenuating their redundant correlations in a latent space. It minimizes off-diagonal elements to enforce independence among the encodings of distinct degradation types, while preserving dominant diagonal elements to maintain shared content information. Furthermore, a degradation-aware gated fusion module leverages these decoupled features to dynamically modulate cross-modal fusion across both channel and spatial dimensions. This facilitates a degradation-conditional fusion process that adaptively suppresses degradation artifacts while preserving beneficial information across varying conditions. In extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, SpeciFuse demonstrates more robust performance under diverse composite degradations. The code is available at https://github.com/xbsj-cool/SpeciFuse.