Detail preserved fusion of infrared and visual images by using opening and closing based toggle operator

•Proposing a detail preserving algorithm for infrared and visual image fusion.•Utilizing the opening and closing based toggle operator for detail preserved fusion.•Extending the multi-scale fusion feature extraction for multi-modal infrared and visual images.

Image fusion is an effective way to combine the useful information in infrared and visual images. One crucial part of infrared and visual image fusion is extracting the useful image features of the original images, and thus maintaining the image details in the final fusion image well. In this paper, a detail preserving algorithm for infrared and visual image fusion based on the multi-scale toggle operator which uses morphological opening and closing operators as primitives is proposed. The toggle operator using opening and closing as primitives is discussed. Also, extracting image regions using the constructed toggle operator is demonstrated. Then, based on the multi-scale theory, extraction of multi-scale image regions using the constructed toggle operator is demonstrated. After appropriately utilizing the extracted multi-scale image features, the effective fusion result is obtained through the strategy of contrast enlargement. Experimental results show that, because the toggle operator using opening and closing as primitives could extract image features well in the original infrared and visual images, the proposed algorithm performs well for detail preserved fusion of infrared and visual images.