PPT Fusion: Pyramid Patch Transformerfor a Case Study in Image Fusion

The Transformer architecture has achieved rapiddevelopment in recent years, outperforming the CNN archi-tectures in many computer vision tasks, such as the VisionTransformers (ViT) for image classification. However, existingvisual transformer models aim to extract semantic informationfor high-level tasks such as classification and detection, distortingthe spatial resolution of the input image, thus sacrificing thecapacity in reconstructing the input or generating high-resolutionimages. In this paper, therefore, we propose a Patch PyramidTransformer(PPT) to effectively address the above issues. Specif-ically, we first design a Patch Transformer to transform theimage into a sequence of patches, where transformer encodingis performed for each patch to extract local representations.In addition, we construct a Pyramid Transformer to effectivelyextract the non-local information from the entire image. Afterobtaining a set of multi-scale, multi-dimensional, and multi-anglefeatures of the original image, we design the image reconstructionnetwork to ensure that the features can be reconstructed intothe original input. To validate the effectiveness, we apply theproposed Patch Pyramid Transformer to the image fusion task.The experimental results demonstrate its superior performanceagainst the state-of-the-art fusion approaches, achieving the bestresults on several evaluation indicators. The underlying capacityof the PPT network is reflected by its universal power in featureextraction and image reconstruction, which can be directlyapplied to different image fusion tasks without redesigning orretraining the network.