Multi-source airborne IR and optical image fusion and its application to target detection

Abstract

This paper describes the fusion of the airborne optical image and IR (infrared) image generated from a moving platform, and the target detection from the fused images. The proposed algorithm first detects the object from optical image and IR image, respectively. Then it performs the object mapping to determine parameters for image fusion. And then it fuses the optical image and IR image and detects the target from the fused images. The real-world videos generated from a helicopter are used to test this algorithm. The experiment results validate the proposed algorithm. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.