HUANG Fuyu, ZHANG Shuai, ZHOU Bing, CHEN Yudan, WANG Peng, LIU Limin
When the conventional feature matching color transfer method is applied to the fusion of ultra-wide field-of-view infrared and low-light images, the problems such as high mismatch rate and poor fusion effect may occur. Thus, A natural color fusion method based on superpixel features and color clustering joint constraints is proposed. First of all, the superpixel segmentation is carried out on low-light image and space of color reference image, and low-level, mid-level, and high-level superpixel feature sets are constructed sequentially. Secondly, the superpixel color clustering of space of color reference image is processed by the improved Fuzzy ART network. Thirdly, the initial superpixel matching set is established based on the similarity of superpixel features. Additionally, with the adaptive color transfer, an initial colorized low-light image is generated and then fused with an ultra-wide field-of-view infrared image to obtain an initial color-fused image. Finally, based on the similarity between infrared-only information and infrared information with color, color transfer is applied to the infrared-only information, ultimately obtaining a naturally colored fused image. The experiment results indicate that compared with traditional methods, the proposed method improves fusion metrics and color metrics by over 19.5% and 9.4%, respectively. The fused images obtained not only retain the significant feature information of both infrared and low-light images well, but also exhibit natural and continuous colors.