Infrared and Visible Image Fusion with Hybrid Image Filtering

Image fusion is an important technique aiming to generate a composite image from multiple images of the same scene. Infrared and visible images can provide the same scene information from different aspects, which is useful for target recognition. But the existing fusion methods cannot well preserve the thermal radiation and appearance information simultaneously. Thus, we propose an infrared and visible image fusion method by hybrid image filtering. We represent the fusion problem with a divide and conquer strategy. A Gaussian filter is used to decompose the source images into base layers and detail layers. An improved co-occurrence filter fuses the detail layers for preserving the thermal radiation of the source images. A guided filter fuses the base layers for retaining the background appearance information of the source images. Superposition of the fused base layer and fused detail layer generates the final fusion image. Subjective visual and objective quantitative evaluations comparing with other fusion algorithms demonstrate the better performance of the proposed method.