An Efficient Natural-Looking Color Fusion Method of Infrared and Visible Images

A novel contrast enhanced fusion (CEF) method is presented for merging infrared and color visible images. The method transforms the original RGB color visible image into a perceptually decorrelated color space in order to treat the achromatic and chromatic components separately. The achromatic component and infrared image are combined by a grayscale fusion scheme, and the original achromatic component is replaced by the grayscale fused image. Before the data are retransformed back into the RGB color space, the means and variances between the original achromatic component and the grayscale fused image are matched by a linear remapping. The remapping procedure can fairly enhance the contrast of the final color fused image. We used the CEF method to merge long wave infrared and color TV images. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively produce a high-contrast color fused image with the similar natural characteristics as the original color visible image