Fusion of Infrared and Visible Light Images Based on Region Segmentation

This article proposes a novel method to fuse infrared and visible light images based on region segmentation. Region segmentation is used to determine important regions and background information in the input image. The non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) provides a flexible multiresolution, local and directional image expansion, and also a sparse representation for two-dimensional (2-D) piecewise smooth signal building images, and then different fusion rules are applied to fuse the NSCT coefficients for given regions and optimize the quality of the fused image. With the proposed method, the fused image exhibits good infrared target features as well as clear visible background. Experimental results have evidenced the simplicity and effectiveness of the method and its advantages over the conventional approaches.