Deno-IF: Unsupervised Noisy Visible and Infrared Image Fusion Method

Most image fusion methods are designed for ideal scenarios and struggle to handle noise. Existing noise-aware fusion methods are supervised and heavily rely on constructed paired data, limiting performance and generalization. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised noisy visible and infrared image fusion method, comprising two key modules. First, when only noisy source images are available, a convolutional low-rank optimization module decomposes clean components based on convolutional low-rank priors, guiding subsequent optimization. The unsupervised approach eliminates data dependency and enhances generalization across various and variable noise. Second, a unified network jointly realizes denoising and fusion. It consists of both intra-modal recovery and inter-modal recovery and fusion, also with a convolutional low-rankness loss for regularization. By exploiting the commonalities of denoising and fusion, the joint framework significantly reduces network complexity while expanding functionality. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method for image fusion under various and variable noise conditions. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/hanna-xu/Deno-IF.