Visible and infrared image enhanced fusion based on MSSTO and NSCT transform

To overcome the disadvantages of low contrast and distortion of the edge region for the existing visible and infrared image fusion methods, an image enhanced fusion algorithm based on the multi-scale sequential toggle operator(MSSTO) and non-subsampled contourlet transform(NSCT) is proposed. Firstly, the source images are decomposed into low frequency and high frequency coefficients by using NSCT transform. Then, the effective bright and dark image informations are extracted from the low frequency coefficients of source images by MSSTO transform, which are injected into the fusing low frequency coefficient to obtain the final low frequency synthetic coefficient. The high frequency sub-band coefficients are fused by using the local spatial frequency weighting and region energy. Finally, the fused image can be obtained by the NSCT inverse transformation of the high and low fused coefficient. The experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.