Image enhancement through weighting function estimation with infrared image

Abstract

This work presents an efficient image fusion of the visible range (VR) and infrared range (IR) images for image enhancement in digital still camera. Fusion is achieved by estimating the weighting parameters which contain the properties of IR image and by combining the VR and IR images using the parameters. Specifically, the weighting parameters are calculated from the estimated illumination and detail components by a weighted low pass filter (WLPF). In addition, for a user preference, we compress dynamic range of the fused image using a retinex technique and adjust contrast/color based on global color distribution. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme produces good outcomes in terms of visual observation and numerical score. ©2010 IEEE.