Real-time Color Night-vision for Visible and Thermal images

This paper presents a real-time scheme to display visible and thermal images in a fused representation with natural daylight color background and highlight thermal targets based on the new lookup-table (LUT) color mapping method, so that the overall scene recognition and situational awareness can be improved. The color LUT is derived from the combination of a visible-thermal image and its daylight-background-highlight-targets fused representation. To form this representation, the grayscale visible image is first transferred daylight colors by using the natural color transfer technique based on local texture information, then the luminance component of this colorized visible image is, replaced with the feature level fusion image that optimized the target region feature of thermal image and the texture feature of visible image by using K-means clustering algorithm and discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Once the LUT has been derived the color mapping can be applied to different images and deployed in real-time. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve satisfying results.