Fusion of colour and monochromatic images with chromacity preservation

We propose a novel method to fuse natural colour images with monochromatic non-visible range images that seeks to efficiently encode important structural information from monochromatic images but also preserve natural appearance of the available true chromacity information. We utilise the β colour opponency channel of the lαβ colour as the domain to fuse information from the monochromatic input into the colour input by the way of robust grayscale fusion. This is combined by effective intensity information fusion that enhances the visibility of monochromatic information in the final colour fused image. Images fused using this method preserve their natural appearance and chromacity better than conventional methods while at the same time clearly encode structural information from the monochorme input. This is demonstrated on a number of well known true colour fusion examples and confirmed by results of subjective trials on data from several colour fusion scenarios.