An FPGA-Based Hardware Implementation of Configurable Pixel-Level Color Image Fusion

Image fusion has attracted a lot of interest in recent years. As a result, different fusion methods have been proposed mainly in the fields of remote sensing and computer (e. g., night) vision, while hardware implementations have been also presented to tackle real-time processing in different application domains. In this paper, a linear pixel-level fusion method is employed and implemented on a field-programmable-gate-array-based hardware system that is suitable for remotely sensed data. Our work incorporates a fusion technique (called VTVA) that is a linear transformation based on the Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix of the source data. The circuit is composed of different modules, including covariance estimation, Cholesky decomposition, and transformation ones. The resulted compact hardware design can be characterized as a linear configurable implementation since the color properties of the final fused color can be selected by the user in a way of controlling the resulting correlation between color components.