Quality assessment of false-colored fused displays

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Abstract— The problem of assessing the quality of fused images (composites created from inputs of differing modalities, such as infrared and visible light radiation) is an important and growing area of research. Recent work has shown that the process of assessing fused images should not rely entirely on subjective quality methods, with objective tasks and computational metrics having important contributions to the assessment procedure. The current paper extends previous findings, applying a psychophysical selection task, metric evaluation, and subjective quality judgments to a range of fused surveillance images. Fusion schemes included the contrast pyramid and shift invariant discrete wavelet transform (Experiment 1), the complex wavelet transform (Experiments 1 & 2), and two false-coloring methods (Experiment 2). In addition, JPEG2000 compression was applied at two levels, as well as an uncompressed control. Reaction time results showed the contrast pyramid to lead to slowest performance in the objective task, whilst the presence of color greatly reduced reaction times. These results differed from both the subjective and metric results. The findings support the view that subjective quality ratings should be used with caution, especially if not accompanied by some task.