<title>Fusion of visible and thermal imagery improves situational awareness</title>

Abstract

Two recently developed color image fusion techniques, the TNO fusion scheme and the MIT fusion scheme, are applied to visible and thermal images of military relevant scenarios. An observer experiment is performed to test if the increased amount of detail in the fused images can yield an improved observer performance in a task that requires situational awareness. The task that is devised involves the detection and localization of a person in the displayed scene relative to some characteristic details that provide the spatial context. Two important results are presented. First, it is shown that color fused imagery leads to improved target detection over all other modalities. Second, results show that observers can indeed determine the relative location of a person in a scene with a significantly higher accuracy when they perform with fused images, compared to the original image modalities. The MIT color fusion scheme yields the best overall performance. Even the most simple fusion scheme yields an observer performance that is better than that obtained for the individual images.