Fusion method for infrared and visible images based on improved quantum theory model

Quantum theory model (QTM) owns a superior characteristic to turn a complex problem into the form of the linear combination of several much simpler components. Therefore, a novel fusion method based on improved quantum theory model (IQTM) is proposed in this paper, aiming at dealing with the fusion problem of infrared and visible images. Firstly, the traditional QTM is modified to be a better version called IQTM. Compared with the traditional QTM, IQTM has three qubit states responsible for reflecting much more information of the represented pixel in the image. Then, the pixels of the source images are transformed into the qubit state representation, and the corresponding quantum results can be obtained according to the basic principle of quantum theory. Finally, the quantum results are transformed into the final fused image. Experimental results show that the proposed method has remarked superiorities over other current typical ones in terms of both fusion performance and computational efficiency.