A fast and efficient image fusion method is presented to generate near-natural colors from panchromatic visual and thermal imaging sensors. Firstly, a set of daytime color reference images are analyzed and the false color mapping principle is proposed according to human's visual and emotional habits. That is, object colors should remain invariant after color mapping operations, differences between infrared and visual images should be enhanced and the background color should be consistent with the main scene content. Then a novel nonlinear color mapping model is given by introducing the geometric average value of the input visual and infrared image gray and the weighted average algorithm. To determine the control parameters in the mapping model, the boundary conditions are listed according to the mapping principle above. Fusion experiments show that the new fusion method can achieve the near-natural appearance of the fused image, and has the features of enhancing color contrasts and highlighting the infrared brilliant objects when comparing with the traditional TNO algorithm. Moreover, it owns the low complexity and is easy to realize real-time processing. So it is quite suitable for the nighttime imaging apparatus.

Date Published: 19 December 2013
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9045, 2013 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology: Optoelectronic Imaging and Processing Technology, 904519 (19 December 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2036249

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9045:
2013 International Conference on Optical Instruments and Technology: Optoelectronic Imaging and Processing Technology
Xinggang Lin; Jesse Zheng, Editor(s)