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DenseNetFuse: a study of deep unsupervised DenseNet to infrared and visual image fusion

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Abstract

Visual images have visual features that are convenient for human observation, while infrared images have thermal features. Image fusion of visual image and the infrared image is the integration of most conductive intrinsic features by still preserving its original visual information concealed in. Image fusion has significant importance in different areas application in special environment (e.g. military, security and in surveillance) and human vision. In recent years, due to the-state-of-the-art discriminative performance, deep learning has been greatly applied in field of image fusion due to its excellent feature extraction ability. This paper employs an innovative approach for image fusion for infrared and visual images using a pre-trained dense block neural network. The model uses an isolated encoder-decoder bi-layered deep learning models, each for visual images and infrared images. An intermediary novel fusion protocols was designed using a hybrid of fusion and L1_norm strategy to infuse both visual and infrared image features. Finally, the resulting images of decoders are made subject to a weighting average to obtained fusion resulting image. Based on subjective evaluation, the proposed model, outperform all existing state of the art literature studies, via different objective evaluation indicators.

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Correspondence to Yue Pan.

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Pan, Y., Pi, D., Khan, I. et al. DenseNetFuse: a study of deep unsupervised DenseNet to infrared and visual image fusion. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 12, 10339–10351 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-02820-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-020-02820-3

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