EvaNet: Towards More Efficient and Consistent Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Assessment

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Cheng, Chunyang, Xu, Tianyang, Wu, Xiao-Jun, Zhou, Tao, Li, Hui, Tang, Zhangyong, Kittler, Josef
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Cheng, Chunyang
Xu, Tianyang
Wu, Xiao-Jun
Zhou, Tao
Li, Hui
Tang, Zhangyong
Kittler, Josef
author_facet Cheng, Chunyang
Xu, Tianyang
Wu, Xiao-Jun
Zhou, Tao
Li, Hui
Tang, Zhangyong
Kittler, Josef
contents Evaluation is essential in image fusion research, yet most existing metrics are directly borrowed from other vision tasks without proper adaptation. These traditional metrics, often based on complex image transformations, not only fail to capture the true quality of the fusion results but also are computationally demanding. To address these issues, we propose a unified evaluation framework specifically tailored for image fusion. At its core is a lightweight network designed efficiently to approximate widely used metrics, following a divide-and-conquer strategy. Unlike conventional approaches that directly assess similarity between fused and source images, we first decompose the fusion result into infrared and visible components. The evaluation model is then used to measure the degree of information preservation in these separated components, effectively disentangling the fusion evaluation process. During training, we incorporate a contrastive learning strategy and inform our evaluation model by perceptual scene assessment provided by a large language model. Last, we propose the first consistency evaluation framework, which measures the alignment between image fusion metrics and human visual perception, using both independent no-reference scores and downstream tasks performance as objective references. Extensive experiments show that our learning-based evaluation paradigm delivers both superior efficiency (up to 1,000 times faster) and greater consistency across a range of standard image fusion benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/EvaNet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02896
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EvaNet: Towards More Efficient and Consistent Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Assessment
Cheng, Chunyang
Xu, Tianyang
Wu, Xiao-Jun
Zhou, Tao
Li, Hui
Tang, Zhangyong
Kittler, Josef
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.4
Evaluation is essential in image fusion research, yet most existing metrics are directly borrowed from other vision tasks without proper adaptation. These traditional metrics, often based on complex image transformations, not only fail to capture the true quality of the fusion results but also are computationally demanding. To address these issues, we propose a unified evaluation framework specifically tailored for image fusion. At its core is a lightweight network designed efficiently to approximate widely used metrics, following a divide-and-conquer strategy. Unlike conventional approaches that directly assess similarity between fused and source images, we first decompose the fusion result into infrared and visible components. The evaluation model is then used to measure the degree of information preservation in these separated components, effectively disentangling the fusion evaluation process. During training, we incorporate a contrastive learning strategy and inform our evaluation model by perceptual scene assessment provided by a large language model. Last, we propose the first consistency evaluation framework, which measures the alignment between image fusion metrics and human visual perception, using both independent no-reference scores and downstream tasks performance as objective references. Extensive experiments show that our learning-based evaluation paradigm delivers both superior efficiency (up to 1,000 times faster) and greater consistency across a range of standard image fusion benchmarks. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/EvaNet.
title EvaNet: Towards More Efficient and Consistent Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Assessment
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02896