Infrared and visual image fusion through feature extraction by morphological sequential toggle operator

Effectively extracting the features of the original images is crucial for infrared and visual image fusion. To well maintain the information of the original infrared and visual images and make the fusion image clear, a sequential toggle operator based algorithm through feature extraction is proposed in this paper. Firstly, sequential toggle operator based on multi-scale theory is discussed. Secondly, the features in the original infrared and visual images are extracted. Thirdly, the final fusion features are calculated from the extracted multi-scale image features through the weight strategy and considering the image details. Finally, after the base image is calculated from the original images, the final fusion image is obtained through enlarging the contrast between the final fusion features by using the base image. Experimental results on different types of infrared and visual images show that, the fusion result effectively combines the information of the original images and the result is clear. So, the fusion result is effective for different infrared image related applications, such as target detection, recognition, and surveillance.