Deep Convolutional Sparse Coding Networks for Interpretable Image Fusion

Image fusion is a significant problem in many fields including digital photography, computational imaging and remote sensing, to name but a few. Recently, deep learning has emerged as an important tool for image fusion. This paper presents CSCFuse, which contains three deep convolutional sparse coding (CSC) networks for three kinds of image fusion tasks (i.e., infrared and visible image fusion, multi-exposure image fusion, and multi-spectral image fusion). The CSC model and the iterative shrinkage and thresholding algorithm are generalized into dictionary convolution units. As a result, all hyper-parameters are learned from data. Our extensive experiments and comprehensive comparisons reveal the superiority of CSCF use with regard to quantitative evaluation and visual inspection.