Fusion of visible and thermal imagery improves situational awareness

A new color image fusion scheme is applied to visible and thermal images of military relevant scenarios. An observer experiment is performed to test if the increased amount of detail in the fused images can improve the accuracy of observers performing a detection and localization task. The results show that observers can localize a target in a scene (1) with a significantly higher accuracy, and (2) with a greater amount of confidence when they perform with fused images (either gray or color fused), compared with the individual image modalities (visible and thermal).