Fusion of visible and infrared imagery for night color vision

A combined approach for fusing night-time infrared with visible imagery is presented in this paper. Night color vision is thus accomplished and the final scene has a natural day-time color appearance. Fusion is based either on non-negative matrix factorization or on a transformation that takes into consideration perceptual attributes. The final obtained color images possess a natural day-time color appearance due to the application of a color transfer technique. In this way inappropriate color mappings are avoided and the overall discrimination capabilities are enhanced. Two different data sets are employed and the experimental results establish the overall method as being efficient, compact and perceptually meaningful.