Modality-Aware Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Target-Aware Supervision

Abstract: Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is a fundamental task in multi-modal perception that aims to integrate complementary structural and textural cues from different spectral domains. In this paper, we propose FusionNet, a novel end-to-end fusion framework that explicitly models inter-modality interaction and enhances task-critical regions. FusionNet introduces a modality-aware attention mechanism that dynamically adjusts the contribution of infrared and visible features based on their discriminative capacity. To achieve fine-grained, interpretable fusion, we further incorporate a pixel-wise alpha blending module, which learns spatially-varying fusion weights in an adaptive and content-aware manner. Moreover, we formulate a target-aware loss that leverages weak ROI supervision to preserve semantic consistency in regions containing important objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). Experiments on the public M3FD dataset demonstrate that FusionNet generates fused images with enhanced semantic preservation, high perceptual quality, and clear interpretability. Our framework provides a general and extensible solution for semantic-aware multi-modal image fusion, with benefits for downstream tasks such as object detection and scene understanding.