Research on Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Based on Tetrolet Transform and Convolution Sparse Representation

Image fusion is a visual enhancement technique that combines source images from different sensors to produce a more robust and informative fused image for subsequent processing or decision making. Infrared and visible light images share complementary properties that enable the production of robust and informative fused images. This paper proposed an infrared and visible image fusion method that improved the tetrolet framework to improve infrared and visible image fusion quality. First, the source image is enhanced by bicubic interpolation. The improved tetrolet transform then decomposes the enhanced source image; the high-frequency components are fused by convolutional sparse representation theory and combined with corresponding rules, and the low-frequency components are fused by defining ISER descriptors. Finally, we use the inverse transform to reconstruct the fused image. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on five groups of typical infrared and visible image datasets demonstrate the proposed method’s effectiveness. The proposed method exhibits better performances on subjective vision and objective indexes compared with the other state-of-the-art methods.