ProtoFusion: Protocol-Guided Prompt Refinement for Generative Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Abstract

Infrared and visible image fusion integrates complementary information from both modalities to provide a more comprehensive representation of the scene. We propose ProtoFusion, a protocol-guided generative framework for infrared and visible image fusion. Instead of relying on fixed fusion operators, hand-crafted objectives, or manually specified one-shot prompts, ProtoFusion formulates fusion as protocol-constrained generation. It represents fusion intent with a structured protocol, consisting of environment state cards, grounding principles, and a style profile, which explicitly specifies which evidence should be preserved or suppressed and which properties the fused result should satisfy. To optimize this protocol, we introduce protocol-guided prompt refinement, a closed-loop learning framework that iteratively performs generation, evaluation, and revision under multimodal evidence. Once learned, the optimized protocol is fixed at inference time and directly guides fusion generation. To address residual source inconsistencies, we further incorporate structured belief construction, which organizes modality reliability, scene evidence, and cross-modal conflicts into a structured representation for conservative correction after generation. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that ProtoFusion improves quantitative performance, achieves favorable results in aesthetic evaluation, and produces visually coherent fusion outputs. Project Page: {https://erfect2020.github.io/ProtoFusion/}.