Fusion of Visual and Infrared Image Based on NSCT

Non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is the combination of the multi-scale analysis and multi-directional analysis in processing high-dimensional signals and has better approximation precision and better sparse description. A novel and efficient fusion method of infrared image and visible image based on NSCT is proposed. Firstly, source fusion images can be decomposed into low-frequency coefficients and high-frequency coefficients using the NSCT. For the low-frequency coefficients, the average fusion algorithm is used. For the each directional high frequency sub-band coefficients, the larger value and region average gradient maximum criterion is used to select the better coefficients for fusion. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better result compared with the traditional image fusion algorithms.