A Multiscale Morphological Method for Visible and Infrared Images Fusion

Abstract

Infrared images (IR) help us to detect hidden targets in the environment, according to the radiation they emit. These work well on the day, at night and in weather conditions such as rain or fog. At the same time, visible images (VIS) provide us with good details of the scenes, which are better perceived by the human eye. Therefore, the fusion of an infrared image and a visible image of the same scene is very useful. In this paper, we propose a fusion method of visible and infrared images using a multiscale morphological approach. First, the base image is generated through the fusion of the two source images. Second, multiple bright and dark features are extracted from each source image by the top-hat transform. Third, the multiple bright and dark scales of the source images are fused. Finally, the fusion of the visible and infrared images is obtained by adding to the base image the maximum values obtained in the previous step. The results show that the proposed method is competitive compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of contrast, brightness, texture and spatial information.