Visible and near-infrared image fusion based on visually salient area selection

This paper presents a novel image fusion algorithm for a visible image and a near infrared (NIR) image. For the proposed fusion, the image is selected pixel-by-pixel based on local saliency. In this paper, the local saliency is measured by a local contrast. Then, the gradient information is fused and the output image is constructed by a Poisson image editing which preserves the gradient information of both images. The effectiveness of the proposed fusion algorithm is demonstrated in various applications including denoising, dehazing, and image enhancement.

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