GUI-aided NIR and color image blending

A near-infrared (NIR) image of a scene contains different information than the corresponding visible spectrum (RGB) image, due to physical phenomena related to scattering, absorption, and reflectance of the different radiation bands. It can be desirable to combine the most relevant image content from both NIR and RGB to improve image quality. In this paper, we present two schemes of combining NIR and RGB information to obtain visually better quality images. The first is an automatic approach that performs segment-based NIR-blending by local and global entropy maximization. The second uses a GUI-aided approach where the user chooses the segments and manually controls blending. To minimize artifacts at the segment boundaries, three different boundary smoothing methods are introduced and compared in terms of speed and quality of output.