An improved image fusion method of infrared image and SAR image based on Contourlet and sparse representation

In this paper, we propose an improved image fusion method of infrared image and SAR image based on the Contourlet transform and sparse representation. For the method, it decompose the source image into the low frequency subband coefficients and the high frequency subband coefficients with the Contourlet transform. The low frequency coefficients with lower sparseness are dealed with sparse representation, construct over complete dictionary, solve sparse coefficient over the trained dictionary, and choose the low frequency coefficients with the larger energy fusion rule. The high frequency subband coefficients are fused by gradient maximin. Different frequency coefficients are used to reconstruct the fused image by the inverse Contourlet transform. Experimental results show that the proposed method is a feasible and effective image fusion method in term of visual quality and objective evaluation.