Infrared and visible image fusion via rolling guidance filter and convolutional sparse representation

Infrared (IR) and visible (VIS) image fusion technology combines the complementary information of the same scene from IR and VIS imaging sensors to generate a composite image, which is beneficial to post image-processing tasks. In order to achieve good fusion performance, a method by combining rolling guidance filter (RGF) and convolutional sparse representation (CSR) is proposed. In the proposed method, RGF is performed on every pre-registered IR and VIS source images to obtain their detail layers and base layer. Then, the detail layers are fused with a serious of weighted coefficients produced by joint bilateral filer (JBF). The base layer is decomposed into a sub-detail-layer and a sub-base-layer. CSR is applied to fuse the sub-detail-layer and averaging strategy is used to fuse the sub-base-layer. Finally, the fused image is reconstructed by adding the fused detail layer and base layer. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method both in subjective and objective assessment.