New method for the fusion of complementary information from infrared and visual images for object detection

摘要

Visual and infrared cameras have complementary properties and using them together may increase the performance of object detection applications. Although the fusion of visual and infrared information results in a better recall rate than using only one of those domains, there is always a decrease in the precision rate whereas the infrared domain on its own always has higher precision. Thus, the fusion of these domains is meaningful only for a better recall rate, which means that more foreground pixels are detected correctly. This study presents a new computationally more efficient and simpler method for extracting the complementary information from both domains and fusing them to obtain better recall rates than those previously achieved. The method has been tested using a well-known database and a database created for the study and compared with earlier fusion methods.