Infrared and visible image fusion method based on rolling guidance filter and NSST

摘要

The rolling guidance filtering (RGF) has a good characteristic which can smooth texture and preserve the edges, and non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST) has the features of translation invariance and direction selection based on which a new infrared and visible image fusion method is proposed. Firstly, the rolling guidance filter is used to decompose infrared and visible images into the base and detail layers. Then, the NSST is utilized on the base layer to get the high-frequency coefficients and low-frequency coefficients. The fusion of low-frequency coefficients uses visual saliency map as a fusion rule, and the coefficients of the high-frequency subbands use gradient domain guided filtering (GDGF) and improved Laplacian sum to fuse coefficients. Finally, the fusion of the detail layers combines phase congruency and gradient domain guided filtering as the fusion rule. As a result, the proposed method can not only extract the infrared targets, but also fully preserves the background information of the visible images. Experimental results indicate that our method can achieve a superior performance compared with other fusion methods in both subjective and objective assessments.