Fusion method for visible and infrared images based on non-subsampled contourlet transform and sparse representation

An image fusion method based on NSCT and spare representation is presented for the lower sparseness of low-frequency sub-band coefficients unfavorable to fusion. Firstly, the infrared and visible images are transformed by NSCT, the common and innovation coefficients are extracted from the sparse coefficients of low-frequency sub-band, and the sparse coefficients are adaptively weighted by the specific coefficients. Secondly, the high-frequency sub-band coefficients with higher sparseness are fused by using a method which takes the sum of absolute values of its coefficients be maximal at the same scale. Finally, the fusion image is reconstructed by the inverse NSCT. The method has better fusion performance than the traditional fusion method based on DWT, NSCT, and the SOMP, JSR fusion method based on sparse representation.