A multi-band image synchronous fusion method based on saliency

A new saliency-based multi-band image synchronous fusion method is proposed. First, combined window filtering is used to decompose the image into base and detail layers to better protect the edges of the image. Second, gamma correction is used for infrared image salient region extraction. To make it more applicable to the base layer fusion, we propose a method to calculate the parameters adaptively according to the image content. Consequently, the fusion result can better retain the thermal radiation information of the target. We then consider both the image quality and the amount of information contained in the image and construct an opti-mization model for synchronous fusion and noise reduction of detail layers to reduce the influence of noisy images on the fusion results. Finally, the fused base and detail layers are combined to obtain the final image. Our proposed method is evaluated and compared with representative methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, applied to the TNO dataset. The results demonstrate that the proposed method aligns with human visual observation in highlighting salient targets and retaining valid detail information. The quality metrics are better than the comparison methods on the whole.