An Efficient Color Transfer Method for Fusion of Multiband Nightvision Images

We present a color transfer method, which is designed to give fused multiband nighttime imagery a natural daytime color appearance in a simple and efficient way. Instead of using traditional nonlinear laß space, the proposed method transfers the color distribution of the target image (daylight color image) to the source image (fused multiband nighttime imagery) in a linear color space named IC
_B
C
_R
. The ICBCR transformation is simpler than the laß conversion, moreover, the IC
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C
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space is easily extended to image fusion. Our experiments on infrared and visual images show that the IC
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C
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based color transfer method works surprisingly well for transferring natural color characteristics of daylight color images to false color fused nighttime imagery.