C22. Enhanced fusion for Infrared and visible images

An enhanced fusion technique for Infrared (IR) and visible images, which is based on the curvelet transform and homomorphic processing using the additive wavelet transform, is presented in this paper. The idea behind this technique is based on fusing the IR and visible images using the curvelet transform, and then decomposing the fused image into sub-bands in an additive fashion using the additive wavelet transform. The homomorphic enhancement is performed on each sub-band, separately. Finally, an inverse additive wavelet transform is performed on the homomorphic enhanced sub-bands to get an enhanced fused image with better visual details. The simulation results with real IR and visible images show that the proposed technique effectively enhances IR targets and preserves the details of visible images.