Fusion technique for infrared and visible light images based on independent component analysis and non-subsampled contourlet transform

The infrared and visible light image fusion based on the non-subsampled contourlet transform(NSCT)can lead the target information to be uncertain and causes the problem of low contrast.As to the issue,a new algorithm by combining the NSCT with the independent component analysis(ICA)is presented.Firstly,the NSCT is applied to the infrared and visible light image for multi-scale and multi-direction decomposition.Then,the low-pass sub-band coefficients in the decomposed images are fused by ICA to attain the low-pass fusion image.Meanwhile,the band-pass sub-band coefficients are fused by the band-pass image fusion rules with neighborhood coefficient difference and information entropy as criteria.Finally,the inverse transform of NSCT is used to fuse the low-pass fusion image and the band-pass fusion image to gain the final fusion image.The simulation validates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.