Existing image fusion methods are typically limited to aligned source images and have to "tolerate" parallaxes when images are unaligned. Simultaneously, the large variances between different modalities pose a significant challenge for multi-modal image registration. This study proposes a novel method called MURF, where for the first time, image registration and fusion are mutually reinforced rather than being treated as separate issues. MURF leverages three modules: shared information extraction module (SIEM), multi-scale coarse registration module (MCRM), and fine registration and fusion module (F2M). The registration is carried out in a coarse-to-fine manner. During coarse registration, SIEM first transforms multi-modal images into mono-modal shared information to eliminate the modal variances. Then, MCRM progressively corrects the global rigid parallaxes. Subsequently, fine registration to repair local non-rigid offsets and image fusion are uniformly implemented in F2M. The fused image provides feedback to improve registration accuracy, and the improved registration result further improves the fusion result. For image fusion, rather than solely preserving the original source information in existing methods, we attempt to incorporate texture enhancement into image fusion. We test on four types of multi-modal data (RGB-IR, RGB-NIR, PET-MRI, and CT-MRI). Extensive registration and fusion results validate the superiority and universality of MURF.

In this paper, we propose a novel method to realize multimodal image registration and fusion in a mutually reinforcing framework, termed as RFNet. We handle the registration in a coarse-to-fine fashion. For the first time, we exploit the feedback of image fusion to promote the registration accuracy rather than treating them as two separate issues. The fine-registered results also improve the fusion performance. Specifically, for image registration, we solve the bottlenecks of defining registration metrics applicable for multi-modal images and facilitating the network convergence. The metrics are defined based on image translation and image fusion respectively in the coarse and fine stages. The convergence is facilitated by the designed metrics and a deformable convolution-based network. For image fusion, we focus on texture preservation, which not only increases the information amount and quality of fusion results but also improves the feedback of fusion results. The proposed method is evaluated on multi-modal images with large global parallaxes, images with local misalignments and aligned images to validate the performances of registration and fusion. The results in these cases demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.