Image fusion with the hybrid evolutionary algorithm and response analysis

Information fusion is a rapidly developing research area aimed at creating methods and tools capable of augmenting security and defense systems with the state-of-the-art computational power and intelligence. An important part of information fusion, image fusion serves as the basis for a fully automatic object and target recognition. Image fusion maps images of the same scene received from different sensors into a common reference system. Using sensors of different types gives rise to a problem of finding a set of invariant features that help overrun the imagery difference caused by the different types of sensors. The paper describes an image fusion method based on the combination of the hybrid evolutionary algorithm and image local response. The latter is defined as an image transform R(V) that maps an image into itself after a geometric transformation A(V) defined by a parameter vector V is applied to the image. The transform R(V) identifies the dynamic content of the image, i.e. the salient features that are most responsive to the geometric transformation A(V). Moreover, since R(V) maps the image into itself, the result of the mapping is largely invariant to the type of the sensor used to obtain the image. Image fusion is stated as the global optimization problem of finding a proper transformation A(V) that minimizes the difference between the images subject to fusion. Hybrid evolutionary algorithm can be applied to solving the problem. Since the search for the optimal parameter vector V is conducted in the response space rather than in the actual image space, the differences in the sensor types can be significantly alleviated.