scholarly journals Fusing Infrared and Visible Images of Different Resolutions via Total Variation Model

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 3827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qinglei Du ◽  
Han Xu ◽  
Yong Ma ◽  
Jun Huang ◽  
Fan Fan

In infrared and visible image fusion, existing methods typically have a prerequisite that the source images share the same resolution. However, due to limitations of hardware devices and application environments, infrared images constantly suffer from markedly lower resolution compared with the corresponding visible images. In this case, current fusion methods inevitably cause texture information loss in visible images or blur thermal radiation information in infrared images. Moreover, the principle of existing fusion rules typically focuses on preserving texture details in source images, which may be inappropriate for fusing infrared thermal radiation information because it is characterized by pixel intensities, possibly neglecting the prominence of targets in fused images. Faced with such difficulties and challenges, we propose a novel method to fuse infrared and visible images of different resolutions and generate high-resolution resulting images to obtain clear and accurate fused images. Specifically, the fusion problem is formulated as a total variation (TV) minimization problem. The data fidelity term constrains the pixel intensity similarity of the downsampled fused image with respect to the infrared image, and the regularization term compels the gradient similarity of the fused image with respect to the visible image. The fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) framework is applied to improve the convergence rate. Our resulting fused images are similar to super-resolved infrared images, which are sharpened by the texture information from visible images. Advantages and innovations of our method are demonstrated by the qualitative and quantitative comparisons with six state-of-the-art methods on publicly available datasets.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Yuqing Zhao ◽  
Guangyuan Fu ◽  
Hongqiao Wang ◽  
Shaolei Zhang

Visible images contain clear texture information and high spatial resolution but are unreliable under nighttime or ambient occlusion conditions. Infrared images can display target thermal radiation information under day, night, alternative weather, and ambient occlusion conditions. However, infrared images often lack good contour and texture information. Therefore, an increasing number of researchers are fusing visible and infrared images to obtain more information from them, which requires two completely matched images. However, it is difficult to obtain perfectly matched visible and infrared images in practice. In view of the above issues, we propose a new network model based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) to fuse unmatched infrared and visible images. Our method generates the corresponding infrared image from a visible image and fuses the two images together to obtain more information. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified qualitatively and quantitatively through experimentation on public datasets. In addition, the generated fused images of the proposed method contain more abundant texture and thermal radiation information than other methods.


Author(s):  
Han Xu ◽  
Pengwei Liang ◽  
Wei Yu ◽  
Junjun Jiang ◽  
Jiayi Ma

In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end model, called dual-discriminator conditional generative adversarial network (DDcGAN), for fusing infrared and visible images of different resolutions. Unlike the pixel-level methods and existing deep learning-based methods, the fusion task is accomplished through the adversarial process between a generator and two discriminators, in addition to the specially designed content loss. The generator is trained to generate real-like fused images to fool discriminators. The two discriminators are trained to calculate the JS divergence between the probability distribution of downsampled fused images and infrared images, and the JS divergence between the probability distribution of gradients of fused images and gradients of visible images, respectively. Thus, the fused images can compensate for the features that are not constrained by the single content loss. Consequently, the prominence of thermal targets in the infrared image and the texture details in the visible image can be preserved or even enhanced in the fused image simultaneously. Moreover, by constraining and distinguishing between the downsampled fused image and the low-resolution infrared image, DDcGAN can be preferably applied to the fusion of different resolution images. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxue XING ◽  
Cheng LIU ◽  
Cong LUO ◽  
Tingfa XU

Abstract In Multi-scale Geometric Analysis (MGA)-based fusion methods for infrared and visible images, adopting the same representation for the two types of the images will result in the non-obvious thermal radiation target in the fused image, which can hardly be distinguished from the background. To solve the problem, a novel fusion algorithm based on nonlinear enhancement and Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) decomposition is proposed. Firstly, NSST is used to decompose the two source images into low- and high-frequency sub-bands. Then, the Wavelet Transform (WT) is used to decompose high-frequency sub-bands into obtain approximate sub-bands and directional detail sub-bands. The “average” fusion rule is performed for fusion for approximate sub-bands. And the “max-absolute” fusion rule is performed for fusion for directional detail sub-bands. The inverse WT is used to reconstruct the high-frequency sub-bands. To highlight the thermal radiation target, we construct a non-linear transform function to determine the fusion weight of low-frequency sub-bands, and whose parameters can be further adjusted to meet different fusion requirements. Finally, the inverse NSST is used to reconstruct the fused image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can simultaneously enhance the thermal target in infrared images and preserve the texture details in visible images, and which is competitive with or even superior to the state-of-the-art fusion methods in terms of both visual and quantitative evaluations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoxue XING ◽  
Cheng LIU ◽  
Cong LUO ◽  
Tingfa XU

Abstract In Multi-scale Geometric Analysis (MGA)-based fusion methods for infrared and visible images, adopting the same representation for the two types of the images will result in the non-obvious thermal radiation target in the fused image, which can hardly be distinguished from the background. To solve the problem, a novel fusion algorithm based on nonlinear enhancement and Non-Subsampled Shearlet Transform (NSST) decomposition is proposed. Firstly, NSST is used to decompose the two source images into low- and high-frequency sub-bands. Then, the wavelet transform(WT) is used to decompose high-frequency sub-bands into obtain approximate sub-bands and directional detail sub-bands. The “average” fusion rule is performed for fusion for approximate sub-bands. And the “max-absolute” fusion rule is performed for fusion for directional detail sub-bands. The inverse WT is used to reconstruct the high-frequency sub-bands. To highlight the thermal radiation target, we construct a non-linear transform function to determine the fusion weight of low-frequency sub-bands, and whose parameters can be further adjusted to meet different fusion requirements. Finally, the inverse NSST is used to reconstruct the fused image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can simultaneously enhance the thermal target in infrared images and preserve the texture details in visible images, and which is competitive with or even superior to the state-of-the-art fusion methods in terms of both visual and quantitative evaluations.


2011 ◽  
Vol 128-129 ◽  
pp. 589-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Feng Niu ◽  
Sheng Tao Xu ◽  
Wei Dong Hu

Infrared and visible image fusion is an important precondition to realize target perception for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) based on which UAV can perform various missions. The details in visible images are abundant, while the target information is more outstanding in infrared images. However, the conventional fusion methods are mostly based on region segmentation, and then the fused image for target recognition can’t be actually acquired. In this paper, a novel fusion method of infrared and visible image based on target regions in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain is proposed, which can gain more target information and preserve the details. Experimental results show that our method can generate better fused image for target recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Javad Abbasi Aghamaleki ◽  
Alireza Ghorbani

AbstractImage fusion is the combining process of complementary information of multiple same scene images into an output image. The resultant output image that is named fused image, produces more precise description of the scene than any of the individual input images. In this paper, we propose a novel simple and fast strategy for infrared (IR) and visible images based on local important areas of IR image. The fusion method is completed in three step approach. Firstly, only the segmented regions in the infrared image is extracted. Next, the image fusion is applied on segmented area and finally, contour lines are also used to improve the quality of the results of the second step of fusion method. Using a publicly available database, the proposed method is evaluated and compared to the other fusion methods. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state of the art methods.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Chaowei Duan ◽  
Yiliu Liu ◽  
Changda Xing ◽  
Zhisheng Wang

An efficient method for the infrared and visible image fusion is presented using truncated Huber penalty function smoothing and visual saliency based threshold optimization. The method merges complementary information from multimodality source images into a more informative composite image in two-scale domain, in which the significant objects/regions are highlighted and rich feature information is preserved. Firstly, source images are decomposed into two-scale image representations, namely, the approximate and residual layers, using truncated Huber penalty function smoothing. Benefiting from the edge- and structure-preserving characteristics, the significant objects and regions in the source images are effectively extracted without halo artifacts around the edges. Secondly, a visual saliency based threshold optimization fusion rule is designed to fuse the approximate layers aiming to highlight the salient targets in infrared images and remain the high-intensity regions in visible images. The sparse representation based fusion rule is adopted to fuse the residual layers with the goal of acquiring rich detail texture information. Finally, combining the fused approximate and residual layers reconstructs the fused image with more natural visual effects. Sufficient experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable or superior performances compared with several state-of-the-art fusion methods in visual results and objective assessments.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baoqing Guo ◽  
Xingfang Zhou ◽  
Yingzi Lin ◽  
Liqiang Zhu ◽  
Zujun Yu

Objects intruding high-speed railway clearance do great threat to running trains. In order to improve accuracy of railway intrusion detection, an automatic multimodal registration and fusion algorithm for infrared and visible images with different field of views is presented. The ratio of the nearest to next nearest distance, geometric, similar triangle, and RANSAC constraints are used to refine the matching SURF feature points successively. Correct matching points are accumulated with multiframe to overcome the insufficient matching points in single image pair. After being registered, an improved Contourlet transform fusion algorithm combined with total variation and local region energy is proposed. Inverse Contourlet transform to low frequency subband coefficient fused with total variation model and high frequency subband coefficients fused with local region energy is used to reconstruct the fused image. The comparison to other 4 popular fusion methods shows that our algorithm has the best comprehensive performance for multimodal railway image fusion.


2010 ◽  
Vol 20-23 ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
Xiang Li ◽  
Yue Shun He ◽  
Xuan Zhan ◽  
Feng Yu Liu

Direction transform; image fusion; infrared images; fusion rule; anisotropic Abstract Based on analysing the feature of infrared and the visible, this paper proposed an improved algorithm using Directionlet transform.The feature is like this: firstly, separate the color visible images to get the component images, and then make anisotropic decomposition for component images and inrared images, after analysing these images, process them according to regional energy rules ,finally incorporate the intense color to get the fused image. The simulation results shows that,this algorithm can effectively fuse infrared and the visible image, moreover, not only the fused images can maintain the environment details, but also underline the edge features, which applies to fusion with strong edges, therefore,this algorithm is of robust and convenient.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Yongxin Zhang ◽  
Deguang Li ◽  
WenPeng Zhu

Image fusion is an important technique aiming to generate a composite image from multiple images of the same scene. Infrared and visible images can provide the same scene information from different aspects, which is useful for target recognition. But the existing fusion methods cannot well preserve the thermal radiation and appearance information simultaneously. Thus, we propose an infrared and visible image fusion method by hybrid image filtering. We represent the fusion problem with a divide and conquer strategy. A Gaussian filter is used to decompose the source images into base layers and detail layers. An improved co-occurrence filter fuses the detail layers for preserving the thermal radiation of the source images. A guided filter fuses the base layers for retaining the background appearance information of the source images. Superposition of the fused base layer and fused detail layer generates the final fusion image. Subjective visual and objective quantitative evaluations comparing with other fusion algorithms demonstrate the better performance of the proposed method.


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