Image fusion based on infrared object extraction

In order to effectively highlight the infrared objects, while preserving the texture details in the visible image as much as possible, so the final fused image is more consistent with human visual perception effect. In this paper, a new fusion method for the infrared and visible images based on infrared target feature extraction is proposed. Firstly, the source images are decomposed into the coarse-scale information and edge texture information by the Gaussian filter; then, the “halo” decomposition is conducted in the edge texture information, based on which, the OTSU multi-threshold segmentation algorithm is used to segment the infrared image into the object region, transition region and background region; finally, the fused weight of each decomposition information is determined according to the segmented results, so as to effectively inject the infrared target information into visible image, and retain the scene details of the visible image as much as possible. Experimental results show that the method can effectively enhance the infrared targets, and retain the visual information as much as possible, and is superior to the commonly-used representative fusion methods both in subjective and objective evaluation.