Infrared and visible image fusion based on target-enhanced multiscale transform decomposition

Abstract In this study, we propose a target-enhanced multiscale transform (MST) decomposition model for infrared and visible image fusion to simultaneously enhance the thermal target in infrared images and preserve the texture details in visible images. The Laplacian pyramid is initially used to separately decompose two pre-registered source images into low- and high-frequency bands. The common “max-absolute” fusion rule is performed for fusion for high-frequency bands. We use the decomposed infrared low-frequency information to determine the fusion weight of low-frequency bands and highlight the target. Meanwhile, a regularization parameter is introduced to dominate the proportion of the infrared features in a gentle manner, which can be further adjusted according to user requirements. Finally, we use inverse transform with the Laplacian pyramid (LP) to reconstruct the fused image. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can generate fused images with clearly highlighted targets and abundant details. These images exhibit better visual effects and objective metric values than those of five other commonly used MST decomposition methods.