Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Method Based on Improved Saliency Detection and Non-subsampled Shearlet Transform

To address the problems in the current infrared and visible image fusion method wherein targets are not prominent and contrast is low based on saliency detection, this paper proposes a fusion method by combining improved saliency detection and non-subsampled shearlet transform (NSST). First, the improved maximum symmetric surround algorithm is used to extract the saliency map of an infrared image, the improved gamma correction method is utilized to enhance the map, and the visible image is enhanced through homomorphic filtering. Second, the infrared and enhanced visible images are decomposed into low-and high-frequency parts through NSST, and the saliency map is used to guide the fusion of the low-frequency parts. Simultaneously, the rule of maximum region energy selection is used to guide the fusion of the high-frequency parts. Finally, the fusion image is reconstructed using the inverse NSST. The experimental results show that the proposed method is far superior to other seven fusion methods in terms of average gradient, information entropy, spatial frequency, and standard deviation. Thus, proposed method can effectively highlight the infrared target, improve the contrast and definition of fused images, and preserve rich background information of visible images.