UUD-Fusion: An unsupervised universal image fusion approach via generative diffusion model

Image fusion is a classical problem in the field of image processing whose solutions are usually not unique. The common image fusion methods can only generate a fixed fusion result based on the source image pairs. They tend to be applicable only to a specific task and have high computational costs. Hence, in this paper, a two-stage unsupervised universal image fusion with generative diffusion model is proposed, termed as UUD-Fusion. For the first stage, a strategy based on the initial fusion results is devised to offload the computational effort. For the second stage, two novel sampling algorithms based on generative diffusion model are designed. The fusion sequence generation algorithm (FSGA) searches for a series of solutions in the solution space by iterative sampling. The fusion image enhancement algorithm (FIEA) greatly improves the quality of the fused images. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of multiple datasets with different modalities demonstrate the great versatility and effectiveness of UUD-Fusion. It is capable of solving different fusion problems, including multi-focus image fusion task, multi-exposure image fusion task, infrared and visible fusion task, and medical image fusion task. The proposed approach is superior to current state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/xiangxiang-wang/UUD-Fusion. •Generative diffusion model is employed as a universal framework for image fusion.•The strategy of generating initial solutions is adopted to reduce the sampling cost.•The fusion sequence generation algorithm is proposed to generate diverse results.•The fusion image enhancement algorithm focuses on fused image quality improvement.