Variational model for infrared and visible light image fusion with saliency preservation
Abstract. Infrared and visible light image fusion is an important issue in the field of infrared technology. A variational model based on saliency preservation is proposed to help fusion process for infrared and visible light image by enhancing the saliency information of source images. The proposed variational model is composed by the weighted fusion term and the gradient fusion term. A weight function constructed by the saliency map of the source images is proposed to form the weighted fusion term. While in the gradient fusion, the target gradient is obtained by the maximum eigen value and corresponding eigen vector of the weighted structure tensor that also contains the salient information of the source images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed variational model better emphasizes the target information of the source images and outperforms other state of the art fusion methods in both aspects of subjective visual and objective performance.
J. Electronic Imaging