Contrast-enhanced fusion of infrared and visible images

Abstract. The fusion of infrared and visible images may result in low contrast, which is unsuitable for observation by human eyes. Thus, we propose a contrast-enhanced fusion algorithm with nonsubsampled shearlet transform (NSST) frames, in which the NSST is first employed to decompose each of the source images into one low frequency sub-band and a series of high frequency sub-bands. To improve the fusion performance, we designed two measures for fusion of the low frequency and the high frequency: the low frequency is divided into salient and nonsalient regions in accordance with the human visual system to improve the global contrast by targeted fusion and the high frequency requires a local contrast fusion strategy. Finally, the merged sub-bands are constructed according to the selection principles, and the final fused image is produced by applying the inverse NSST on these merged sub-bands. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art fusion methods in terms of both visual effect and objective evaluation results.