Color outdoor image enhancement by V-NIR fusion and weighted luminance

Outdoor color images are often degraded due to uncontrolled conditions such as lighting, pollution, fog, shadows or haze. Those conditions cause loss of contrast and detail as the scattering has attenuation and smoothing effect. Considering Near Infrared (NIR) light is lower scatters than visible light due to its long wavelength, the NIR is spread through the fog. NIR images usually contain important information that can complement the visible image (V) in the same scene. In this work, we propose to fused V and NIR images, of the same scene, by pixel weight assignation of the luminance. The results show that color images are capable to enhance certain features not visible at the input V image. Moreover, the proposed fusion method provides relevant information from the NIR image while preserves the V information. The main characteristic of our approach to fusing is that only the relevant information is fused and the resulting colors are consistent with the scene.