Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Based on Co-occurrence Analysis Shearlet Transform Context-Aware

This study based on co-occurrence analysis shearlet transform (CAST) effectively combines the latent low rank representation (LatLRR) and the regularization of zero-crossing counting in differences to fuse the heterogeneous images. First, the source images are decomposed by CAST method into base-layer and detail-layer sub-images. Secondly, for the base-layer components with larger-scale intensity variation, the LatLRR, is a valid method to extract the salient information from image sources, and can be applied to generate saliency map to implement the weighted fusion of base-layer images adaptively. Meanwhile, the regularization term of zero crossings in differences, which is a classic method of optimization, is designed as the regularization term to construct the fusion of detail-layer images. By this method, the gradient information concealed in the source images can be extracted as much as possible, then the fusion image owns more abundant edge information. Compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms on publicly available datasets, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperformed in enhancing the contrast and achieving close fusion result.

Thermal Image Generation for Robust Face Recognition

This article shows how to create a robust thermal face recognition system based on the FaceNet architecture. We propose a method for generating thermal images to create a thermal face database with six different attributes (frown, glasses, rotation, normal, vocal, and smile) based on various deep learning models. First, we use StyleCLIP, which oversees manipulating the latent space of the input visible image to add the desired attributes to the visible face. Second, we use the GANs N’ Roses (GNR) model, a multimodal image-to-image framework. It uses maps of style and content to generate thermal imaging from visible images, using generative adversarial approaches. Using the proposed generator system, we create a database of synthetic thermal faces composed of more than 100k images corresponding to 3227 individuals. When trained and tested using the synthetic database, the Thermal-FaceNet model obtained a 99.98% accuracy. Furthermore, when tested with a real database, the accuracy was more than 98%, validating the proposed thermal images generator system.

Near Infrared and Visible Image Registration using Whale Optimization Algorithm

This paper reports the use of a nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm known as ‘Whale Optimization Algorithm’ (WOA) for multimodal image registration. WOA is based on the hunting behaviour of Humpback whales and provides better exploration and exploitation of the search space with small possibility of trapping in local optima. Though WOA is used in various optimization problems, no detailed study is available for its use in image registration. For this study different sets of NIR and visible images are considered. The registration results are compared with the other state of the art image registration methods. The results show that WOA is a very competitive algorithm for NIR-visible image registration. With the advantages of better exploration of search space and local optima avoidance, the algorithm can be a suitable choice for multimodal image registration.