Visible-infrared image fusion method using anisotropic diffusion

Abstract

In this paper, Visible and Infrared sensors are used to take complementary images of a targeted scene. Image fusion thus aims to integrate the two images so that maximum information and fewer artifacts are introduced in the fused image. The concept of merging two different multisensor images using the combination of Anisotropic Diffusion (AD) and max–min approach is carried out in this paper. Herein, each of the registered source images are decomposed into approximation and detailed layers using AD filter. Later, max–min fusion rules are applied on detail and approximate layer, respectively, to preserve both spectral as well as structural information. Image-quality assessment of the fused images is made using structural similarity index (SSIM), fusion factor (FF), and entropy (E) which justifies the effectiveness of proposed method.