Multi-interactive Feature Learning and a Full-time Multi-modality
  Benchmark for Image Fusion and Segmentation
Jinyuan Liu Zhu Liu Guanyao Wu Long Ma Risheng Liu Wei Zhong Zhongxuan Luo Xin Fan
Multi-modality image fusion and segmentation play a vital role in autonomous
driving and robotic operation. Early efforts focus on boosting the performance
for only one task, \emph{e.g.,} fusion or segmentation, making it hard to
reach~`Best of Both Worlds'. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose
a \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{i}nteractive \textbf{F}eature learning architecture
for image fusion and \textbf{Seg}mentation, namely SegMiF, and exploit
dual-task correlation to promote the performance of both tasks. The SegMiF is
of a cascade structure, containing a fusion sub-network and a commonly used
segmentation sub-network. By slickly bridging intermediate features between two
components, the knowledge learned from the segmentation task can effectively
assist the fusion task. Also, the benefited fusion network supports the
segmentation one to perform more pretentiously. Besides, a hierarchical
interactive attention block is established to ensure fine-grained mapping of
all the vital information between two tasks, so that the modality/semantic
features can be fully mutual-interactive. In addition, a dynamic weight factor
is introduced to automatically adjust the corresponding weights of each task,
which can balance the interactive feature correspondence and break through the
limitation of laborious tuning. Furthermore, we construct a smart multi-wave
binocular imaging system and collect a full-time multi-modality benchmark with
15 annotated pixel-level categories for image fusion and segmentation.
Extensive experiments on several public datasets and our benchmark demonstrate
that the proposed method outputs visually appealing fused images and perform
averagely $7.66\%$ higher segmentation mIoU in the real-world scene than the
state-of-the-art approaches. The source code and benchmark are available at
\url{https://github.com/JinyuanLiu-CV/SegMiF}.