Fusion of visible and infrared images using global entropy and gradient constrained regularization

Infrared and visible image fusion has been an important and popular topic in imaging science. Dual-band image fusion aims to extract both target regions in infrared image and abundant detail information in visible image into fused result, preserving even enhancing the information that inherits from source images. In our study, we propose an optimization-based fusion method by combining global entropy and gradient constrained regularization. We design a cost function by taking the advantages of global maximum entropy as the first term, together with gradient constraint as the regularized term. In this cost function, global maximum entropy could make the fused result inherit as more information as possible from sources. And using gradient constraint, the fused result would have clear details and edges with noise suppression. The fusion is achieved based on the minimization of the cost function by adding weight value matrix. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method performs well and has obvious superiorities over other typical algorithms in both subjective visual performance and objective criteria.