Fusion of visible and infrared images using saliency analysis and detail preserving based image decomposition

Image fusion for visible and infrared images is a significant task in image analysis. The target regions in infrared image and abundant detail information in visible image should be both extracted into the fused result. Thus, one should preserve or even enhance the details from original images in fusion process. In this paper, an algorithm using pixel value based saliency detection and detail preserving based image decomposition is proposed. Firstly, the multi-scale decomposition is constructed using weighted least squares filter for original infrared and visible images. Secondly, the pixel value based saliency map is designed and utilized for image fusion in different decomposition level. Finally, the fusion result is reconstructed by synthesizing different scales with synthetic weights. Since the information of original signals can be well preserved and enhanced with saliency extraction and multi scale decomposition process, the fusion algorithm performs robustly and excellently. The proposed approach is compared with other state-of the-art methods on several image sets to verify the effectiveness and robustness.