Image fusion based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform for infrared and visible light image

In this paper, a new method based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) is proposed to fuse the infrared image and the visible light image, which will produce a new fused image by which the target can be identified more easily. Firstly, two original images were decomposed into low frequency subband coefficients and the bandpass direction subband coefficients by using NSCT. Secondly, the selection of the low frequency subband coefficient and the bandpass direction subband coefficient is discussed in detail. The low frequency subband coefficients are selected based on the regional visual characteristics. For the selection of bandpass direction subband coefficients, this paper proposes a minimum regional cross-gradient method, and the cross-gradient is gained by calculating the gradient between the pixel of bandpass subbands and the adjacent pixel in the fused image of the low-frequency components. Comparison experiments have been performed on different image sets, and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better in both subjective and objective qualities. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.