Improved visual/infrared colour fusion method with double‐opponency colour constancy mechanism

Abstract

To solve problems that colour distortion and low resolution of infrared and visible colour fusion images, the authors propose a fusion method based on the double-opponency colour constancy mechanism of human vision. First, Waxman's fusion method which imitated the neuro-dynamics mechanism of the rattlesnake bimodal cell is used to fuse the visible light with the source multi-band images to generate pseudo-colour images. Second, a double-opponent colour constancy computation model based on Rodieck's double difference-of-Gaussian is proposed to obtain the estimate of an illuminant of colour fusion images. Finally, the colour fusion images are corrected by the diagonal transformation model based on the cone adaptive mechanism. They also propose to use the three-dimensional RGB histogram to analyse the colour distribution of colour fusion images. In the comparison experiments with other approaches using the three-dimensional RGB histogram, one can see that the proposed fusion method gives colour image coinciding well with natural colour distribution and satisfies human perception needs.