A High-Speed Image Fusion Method Using Hardware and Software Co-Simulation

Abstract

The process of adding significant information of two source images obtained from various sources into one image is called image fusion. Large volumes of data informations are obtained from various remote sensors. These informations are useful for image diagnosis through image fusion. Thus image fusion is the promising area of research. Many methods of image fusion have been suggested by the previous authors to produce a fused image having higher spatial resolution, but due to large amounts of data calculations, it is a time-consuming process. Therefore, a reconfigurable hardware system having high speed such as Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used for solving complex algorithm with reduced computation time to achieve parallel operation with high-speed characteristics. This paper describe the design and implementation of improved speed discrete wavelet transform based multisensor image fusion process with its implementation on hardware. MATLAB 2016a Simulink tools are used to integrate the Xilinx System generator with averaging method for image fusion. Algorithm design has been synthesized in Xilinx ISE 14.1and the same is implemented on ML 605 Virtex-6 FPGA kit. From the result, it is observed that the design consumes a total power of 4.36 W and operates at a maximum frequency of 851. 06 MHz.