REPUBLIC OF SERBIA

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

www.mod.gov.rs

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

Material Resources Sector

Defensive Technologies Department

Military Technical Institute

www.vti.mod.gov.rs

FUSION OF COLOUR AND MONOCHROMATIC IMAGES WITH ENCODING OF MONOCHROME STRUCTURE

Rade Pavlović

Military Archive, Ministry of Defence, Belgrade, rade_pav@yahoo.com

Vladimir Petrović

Imaging Sciencе, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK , v.petrovic@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract: We propose a novel method to fuse true colour images with monochromatic non-visible range images that seeks to encode important structural information from monochromatic images efficiently but also preserve the natural appearance of the available true chromacity information. We utilise the β colour opponency channel of the lαβ colour as the domain to fuse information from the monochromatic input into the colour input by the way of robust grayscale fusion. This is followed by an effective gradient structure visualisation step that enhances the visibility of monochromatic information in the final colour fused image. Images fused using this method preserve their natural appearance and chromacity better than conventional methods while at the same time clearly encode structural information from the monochormatic input. This is demonstrated on a number of well known true colour fusion examples and confirmed by results of subjective trials on data from several colour fusion scenarios.

Key words: Colour image fusion, Chromacity preservation, Color space.