A three scale image transformation for infrared and visible image fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion is an active area in digital image processing. Many methods in spatial or transform domains have been proposed, but there are still several complex challenges. In this paper, we introduce a three-scale image transformation, which possesses multi-scale, translation-invariance and spatial-localization characteristics that are very important for image fusion. The decomposition can be implemented sequentially by shear transform, undecimated framelet transform and average filtering. Furthermore, we propose a multi-direction image fusion method based on the transformation, where the guided filtering based fusion rule and regional energy fusion rule are used. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms some representative methods, such as the methods based on Laplacian pyramid, wavelets, guided filtering, framelet, and the combination of nonsub-sampled contourlet transform and nonsubsampled shearlet transform.