Contrast Enhancement for Visible-Infrared Image Using Image Fusion and Sharpen Filters

Image enhancement using image fusion is very important for many applications. Image fusion is performed in spatial domain or in transform domain. Weighted averaging-based image fusion is achieved in spatial domain. The fused image using this method is a low-contrast and blurriness image. The quality of the fused image in transform domain is better than fused image in spatial domain. The standard Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) based fusion is performed in transform domain and it produces better result compared with the weighted averaging-based fusion. However, the fused image using DWT based fusion lacks spatial details. In this paper, a simple image fusion is proposed in order to enhance the quality of the fused image using weighted averaging or DWT based image fusion for visible-infrared images. In nature, infrared image is a blurred image, so the convolution process is performed between the input infrared image and the proposed sharpen filter. The output is an image with highlighting edges and fine details. Using weighted averaging or DWT based image fusion to fuse the visible image and the enhanced infrared image to obtain the final image. The experimental results showed that the proposed fusion method produces better results than the standard fusion methods.