Color image fusion utilizing NSCT and YUV transform

A new color image fusion method utilizing NSCT and YUV transform is proposed. The two source images are changed into gray images by gray transform and color visible light image is decomposed into three components which are Y, U and V by YUV transform. Gray infrared image and gray visible light image are fused by NSCT to obtain fused image. In the fusion process, the low frequency components are fused based on region energy criterion and the high frequency components are fused utilizing absolute value criterion. The Y component of color visible light image is replaced by the fused image. Then The final fused color image is obtained by inverse YUV transform from U,V and Y above. Simulation results show that the method can maintain the details of the image texture and color information well, and the objective evaluation parameters such as mean, variance, information entropy and spatial frequency for R, G, B channels are greatly improved. The proposed method is an effective color image fusion algorithm.