Infrared-visible image fusion method based on multi-scale shearing Co-occurrence filter

Abstract

Infrared-visible image fusion aims to achieve salient targets and abundant texture details. However, most of fusion methods based on multi-scale decomposition fail to effectively preserve detailed and texture information. To avoid these issues, a novel fusion method is proposed by means of multi-scale shearing Co-occurrence filter (MSCOF). This multi-scale decomposition tool possesses the flexible multi-direction and shift-invariant properties of the Shearlet, as well as the smoothing advantages of the Co-occurrence filter (COF). In this study, we obtain approximate and detail subbands by performing MSCOF decomposition on the original images. A weighted fusion rule based on the saliency intensity value (SIV) is performed to combine approximate subbands. Notably, COF is employed on the saliency intensity maps to better preserve edge information of the original image on the fused approximate subbands. Meanwhile, the improved local gradient energy (ILGE) method is utilized to fuse the detail subbands. The results of experimental analysis fully prove that our method is reliable and feasible, and that the obtained objective evaluation metrics are superior to those of some typical methods.