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Fusion of the long wave thermal infrared and the visible and near infrared aerial images

Recent research in projects ARC and SMART (European Commission IST programme) shows that long wave thermal IR images enable detection of the objects that are otherwise not detectable. However, the important conclusion from this research is that the spatial resolution of available thermal IR cameras is not satisfactory. The possible way to compensate partially this deficiency can be data fusion. Due to the experience gained and the lessons learned in many years of the airborne remote sensing with thermal IR cameras we decided to analyze the fusion of the thermal IR images with images from visible and near IR wavelengths. The first goal was improvement of spatial resolution (sharpening) and this has been achieved. More important goal was the evaluation the radiometric quality of the fusion due to different physical background of the images. For this purpose many statistical parameters of different objects in the source thermal IR image were analysed and compared to the respective statistical parameters set for the same objects in the image obtained by fusion. The objects used in the analysis selected by use of the ground truth data that were available for the identification. The thermal IR contrast C between object “o” and background “b” used for comparison of the fused and source images too. The results of the analysis approved that the applied fusion method provides improvement of the spatial resolution and that thermal information of the analyzed objects conserved. Due to ap-proved quality of the fusion method, we recommend its application.

long-wave IR; visible and near IR; spatial resolution; criteria; fusion

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