Infrared and visible image fusion via octave Gaussian pyramid framework

Image fusion integrates information from multiple images (of the same scene) to generate a (more informative) composite image suitable for human and computer vision perception. The method based on multiscale decomposition is one of the commonly fusion methods. In this study, a new fusion framework based on the octave Gaussian pyramid principle is proposed. In comparison with conventional multiscale decomposition, the proposed octave Gaussian pyramid framework retrieves more information by decomposing an image into two scale spaces (octave and interval spaces). Different from traditional multiscale decomposition with one set of detail and base layers, the proposed method decomposes an image into multiple sets of detail and base layers, and it efficiently retains high- and low-frequency information from the original image. The qualitative and quantitative comparison with five existing methods (on publicly available image databases) demonstrate that the proposed method has better visual effects and scores the highest in objective evaluation.