Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to extract and integrate the complementary information in two different modalities to generate high-quality fused images with salient targets and abundant texture details. However, current image fusion methods go to great lengths to excavate complementary features, which is generally achieved through two efforts. On the one hand, the feature extraction network is expected to have excellent performance in extracting complementary information. On the other hand, complex fusion strategies are often designed to aggregate the complementary information. In other words, enabling the network to perceive and extract complementary information is extremely challenging. Complicated fusion strategies, while effective, still run the risk of losing weak edge details. To this end, this paper rethinks the IVIF outside the box, proposing a complementary-redundant information transfer network (C-RITNet). It reasonably transfers complementary information into redundant one, which integrates both the shared and complementary features from two modalities. Hence, the proposed method is able to alleviate the challenges posed by the complementary information extraction and reduce the reliance on sophisticated fusion strategies. Specifically, to skillfully sidestep aggregating complementary information in IVIF, we first design the mutual information transfer (MIT) module to mutually represent features from two modalities, roughly transferring complementary information into redundant one. Then, a redundant information acquisition supervised by source image (RIASSI) module is devised to further ensure the complementary-redundant information transfer after MIT. Meanwhile, we also propose a structure information preservation (SIP) module to guarantee that the edge structure information of the source images can be transferred to the fusion results.

借助互补冗余信息传输网络（C-RITNet），本论文提出了一个能够提取和整合两种不同模态中的互补信息以生成高质量融合图像的方法，通过互信息传输模块（MIT）、冗余信息获取以源图像为监督的模块（RIASSI）和结构信息保留模块（SIP），能够解决互补信息提取和稳定边缘结构信息的挑战。

C-RITNet：基于红外和可见光图像融合的无需补充信息挖掘