Fusion of Infrared and Visible Sensor Images Based on Anisotropic Diffusion and Karhunen-Loeve Transform

Abstract

Image fusion is a process of generating a more informative image from a set of source images. Major applications of image fusion are in navigation and military. Here, infrared and visible sensors are used to capture complementary images of the targeted scene. The complementary information of these source images has to be integrated into a single image using some fusion algorithms. The aim of any fusion method is to transfer maximum information from the source images to the fused image with a minimum information loss. It has to minimize the artifacts in the fused image. In this paper, we propose a new edge preserving image fusion method for infrared and visible sensor images. Anisotropic diffusion is used to decompose the source images into approximation and detail layers. Final detail and approximation layers are calculated with the help of Karhunen-Loeve transform and weighted linear superposition, respectively. A fused image is generated from the linear combination of final detail and approximation layers. Performance of the proposed algorithm is assessed with the help of petrovic metrics. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the traditional and recent image fusion algorithms. Results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods.