Visual and Infrared Image Fusion Based on Contourlet Transform

A new region-based image fusion technique using the contourlet transform (CT) is proposed to produce a fused image better for human and machine interpretation. For good properties of multiscale, localization, directionality and anisotropy, the infrared and visual images are first decomposed using contourlet transform then fusion rules were applied to low frequency components and high frequency components of contourlet coefficients. For the low-frequency coefficients, the average fusion algorithm is used. For the each directional high frequency sub-band coefficients, the region energy and region average gradient maximum criterion are used to select the better coefficients for fusion. Compared with the traditional image fusion algorithms, the fusion algorithm presented in this paper provides better subjective visual effect, and the standard deviation and entropy value would be somewhat increased.