An Efficient Color Transfer Method for Fusion of Multiband Nightvision Images

We present a color transfer method, which is designed to give fused multiband nighttime imagery a natural daytime color appearance in a simple and efficient way. Instead of using traditional nonlinear l�.�� space, the proposed method transfers the color distribution of the target image (daylight color image) to the source image (fused multiband nighttime imagery) in a linear color space named ICBCR. The ICBCR transformation is simpler than the l�.�� conversion, moreover, the ICBCR space is easily extended to image fusion. Our experiments on infrared and visual images show that the ICBCR based color transfer method works surprisingly well for transferring natural color characteristics of daylight color images to false color fused nighttime imagery.

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