Infrared and visible image fusion based on non-subsampled shearlet transform, regional energy, and co-occurrence filtering

The fusion of infrared and visible images has been playing an important role in various scenarios all over the world. For the fusion results from most of the existing techniques in this area, some features, such as the image contrast and edge details, are still needed to be improved. In this Letter, a new fusion method of the infrared and visible image is rendered. In this method, the infrared image is preprocessed to improve the contrast. Then, the two source images are decomposed based on non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST). The fusion rules based on regional energy and co-occurrence filtering are proposed for the low-frequency and high-frequency NSST coefficients, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively retain the details of the source image, meanwhile improve the contrast of the fused image.