FUSING IMAGES FOR VISION CLARITY

The importance of image fusion keeps increasing and its application can be found in many fields; from military and security up to medical diagnostics. This project of image fusing has been undertaken by the author to improve the clarity of night vision. The technique used is basically a pixel replacement technique between optical image and infra red (IR) image. By such technique, the fused image will have a better percept where it still have the color characteristic from optical image as well as clarity at dark portion, which is from IR image. The methodology involved in this project include identifying the problem statement, objective and scope of the project, research and review of relevant literature, familiarization with software (Matlab - Image Processing Tool and Graphical User Interface), creating the interface outline, perform fusion of still images and improvising the interface as well as the fused images. Further work for this project can be fusion for movie data, followed by real time fusion. To work with stream of movie data, such data must be batched first into sequence of image frames, where the fusion will take part continuously on this sequence of frames. The image processing and interface used for this project will be done using MATLAB v7.1. Progress of the project, discussions and recommendations also had been detailed in this report in their respective chapters