New optimised region-based multi-scale image fusion method for thermal and visible images

On constructing a fused image by employing only individual pixels or a set of pixels within a small neighbourhood of the images (SIs) acquired from the same scene, pixel-based fusion techniques suffer from some drawbacks, such as blurring effects, high sensitivity to noise and misregistration. To overcome these drawbacks, this study proposes a new region-based image fusion method for thermal and visible images. Since different regions with certain properties need to be emphasised differently in the fused image, the corresponding regions of the SIs are optimally merged to obtain the fused image by employing multiple weighting factors (WFs). To improve the quality of the fused images, WFs were optimised by employing the differential evolution algorithm. Furthermore, a new quality metric was also developed to measure the quality of the fused images during the optimisation process. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed method.