Novel infrared and visible image fusion method based on independent component analysis

The goal of infrared (IR) and visible image fusion is for the fused image to contain IR object features from the IR image and retain the visual details provided by the visible image. The disadvantage of traditional fusion method based on independent component analysis (ICA) is that the primary feature information that describes the IR objects and the secondary feature information in the IR image are fused into the fused image. Secondary feature information can depress the visual effect of the fused image. A novel ICA-based IR and visible image fusion scheme is proposed in this paper. ICA is employed to extract features from the infrared image, and then the primary and secondary features are distinguished by the kurtosis information of the ICA base coefficients. The secondary features of the IR image are discarded during fusion. The fused image is obtained by fusing primary features into the visible image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better perception effect.