Fusion of the low-light-level visible and infrared images for night-vision context enhancement

For better night-vision applications using the low-light-level visible and infrared imaging, a fusion framework for night-vision context enhancement (FNCE) method is proposed. An adaptive brightness stretching method is first proposed for enhancing the visible image. Then, a hybrid multi-scale decomposition with edge-preserving filtering is proposed to decompose the source images. Finally, the fused result is obtained via a combination of the decomposed images in three different rules. Experimental results demonstrate that the FNCE method has better performance on the details (edges), the contrast, the sharpness, and the human visual perception. Therefore, better results for the night-vision context enhancement can be achieved.