Copyright © 2012 Yifeng Niu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Infrared and visible image fusion is an important precondition of realizing target perception for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), then UAV can perform various given missions. Information of texture and color in visible images are abundant, while target information in infrared images is more outstanding. The conventional fusion methods are mostly based on region segmentation; as a result, the fused image for target recognition could not be actually acquired. In this paper, a novel fusion method of airborne infrared and visible image based on target region segmentation and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is proposed, which can gain more target information and preserve more background information. The fusion experiments are done on condition that the target is unmoving and observable both in visible and infrared images, targets are moving and observable both in visible and infrared images, and the target is observable only in an infrared image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate better fused image for airborne target perception.