Fusion of DMSP OLS nighttime visible image and OLS thermal infrared image

In this paper, in order to improve the detection and recognition of cloud during the night, we make a study on the fusion of DMSP OLS nighttime visible image and infrared image through application of a typical set of image algorithms. We employ the quality measure Q to evaluate the performance of each algorithm. The results indicate that the qualities of fused images are actually improved relative not only to visible images but also to infrared images after image fusion, and the quality of fused image improves very distinctly relative to the nighttime visible image. The fused image contains more abundant information about the cloud.