Reflectance estimation for infrared and visible image fusion

Abstract

The desirable result of infrared (IR) and visible (VIS) image fusion should have textural details from VIS images and salient targets from IR images. However, detail information in the dark regions of VIS image has low contrast and blurry edges, resulting in performance degradation in image fusion. To resolve the troubles of fuzzy details in dark regions of VIS image fusion, we have proposed a method of reflectance estimation for IR and VIS image fusion. In order to maintain and enhance details in these dark regions, dark region approximation (DRA) is pro-posed to optimize the Retinex model.With the improved Retinex model based on DRA, quasi-Newton method is adopted to estimate the reflectance of a VIS image. The final fusion out-come is obtained by fusing the DRA-based reflectance of VIS image with IR image. Our method could simultaneously retain the low visibility details in VIS images and the high con-trast targets in IR images. Experiment statistic shows that compared to some advanced ap-proaches, the proposed method has superiority on detail preservation and visual quality.