A multisensor image fusion and enhancement system for assisting drivers in poor lighting conditions

A system of multisensor image fusion and enhancement for visibility improvement is proposed in this paper for helping drivers driving at night or under bad weather conditions. Video stream captured by a CCD camera is enhanced, then aligned and fused with another stream captured by a thermal camera to improve the visibility of roads in extremely low lighting conditions. A nonlinear image enhancement technique capable of dynamic range compression and contrast enhancement is developed to enhance the visible images prior to fusion. The thermal image and the enhanced visible image are then aligned based on prior information obtained on image registration process. Pixel-level multiresolution based image fusion method is applied to merge source images. After image fusion, a color restoration is performed on fused images with the chromatic information of visible images. The entire image processing and analysis system is being installed in an FPGA environment. Preliminary results obtained in various experiments conducted with the proposed system are encouraging