Fusion of Infrared and Visible Images Using Fast Global Smoothing Decomposition and Target-Enhanced Parallel Gaussian Fuzzy Logic

As a powerful technique to merge complementary information of original images, infrared (IR) and visible image fusion approaches are widely used in surveillance, target detecting, tracking, and biological recognition, etc. In this paper, an efficient IR and visible image fusion method is proposed to simultaneously enhance the significant targets/regions in all source images and preserve rich background details in visible images. The multi-scale representation based on the fast global smoother is firstly used to decompose source images into the base and detail layers, aiming to extract the salient structure information and suppress the halos around the edges. Then, a target-enhanced parallel Gaussian fuzzy logic-based fusion rule is proposed to merge the base layers, which can avoid the brightness loss and highlight significant targets/regions. In addition, the visual saliency map-based fusion rule is designed to merge the detail layers with the purpose of obtaining rich details. Finally, the fused image is reconstructed. Extensive experiments are conducted on 21 image pairs and a Nato-camp sequence (32 image pairs) to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. Compared with several state-of-the-art methods, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve more competitive or superior performances according to both the visual results and objective evaluation.