Streaming Diffusion Model for Fast Infrared and Visible Video Fusion

Infrared and visible video fusion is pivotal for robust perceptual systems, aiming to synthesize a comprehensive video stream that leverages both thermal resilience and textured details. However, prevailing methods, by treating video as independent frames, inherently introduce temporal incoherence, such as flickering and ghosting artifacts. While diffusion models possess strong generative priors to remedy this, their iterative nature is prohibitively slow for video. To resolve this fundamental dilemma, we propose a streaming diffusion model for efficient infrared and visible video fusion, termed SDMFusion. Our key insight is to distill the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model into a one-step sampling framework, while explicitly modeling temporal dynamics. We design a memory-augmented latent pipeline where a temporal aggregation adapter aligns and propagates cross-frame features to ensure coherence, supported by a dedicated temporal consistency loss. This approach effectively decouples the challenge of achieving high fidelity from maintaining temporal stability. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, generating fused videos with exceptional spatio-temporal consistency at a speed suitable for real-time application.