Fusion

Introduction

Many modern weapon sights and surveillance systems contain sensors using different spectral bands, such as image intensifiers, thermal imagers, mmw radar or standard visible band colour cameras. Typically these systems only have a single display, so the viewer must choose which image to concentrate on, or must cycle through the different sensor outputs. Image fusion is a technique which allows us to combine the complementary information from each sensor into a single, superior image which can be displayed to the operator.

Teamwork

Octec are working with Waterfall Solutions to produce a flexible and robust real-time image fusion system. The system builds on Waterfall's experience in adaptive image fusion and related image processing and combines this expertise with Octec's long track record of implementing real time, rugged image processing systems.

Fusion Schemes

A number of image fusion schemes are possible, including:

Pre-processing and Image Alignment

Before two images are fused, it is important that they are pre-processed in order to reduce noise or unwanted artefacts and in many cases to enhance image contrast. All image fusion schemes rely on features within each image being aligned to the same pixel position. If the sensors to be fused are not perfectly aligned, any corrections to the alignment can be made through a low-latency image warp function. An example of image fusion is illustrated below.