We present an algorithm that produces a fused false color representation of a combined multiband IR and visual imaging
system for maritime applications. Multispectral IR imaging techniques are increasingly deployed in maritime operations,
to detect floating mines or to find small dinghies and swimmers during search and rescue operations. However, maritime
backgrounds usually contain a large amount of clutter that severely hampers the detection of small targets. Our new
algorithm deploys the correlation between the target signatures in two different IR frequency bands (3-5 and 8-12 μm) to
construct a fused IR image with a reduced amount of clutter. The fused IR image is then combined with a visual image in
a false color RGB representation for display to a human operator. The algorithm works as follows. First, both individual
IR bands are filtered with a morphological opening top-hat transform to extract small details. Second, a common image
is extracted from the two filtered IR bands, and assigned to the red channel of an RGB image. Regions of interest that
appear in both IR bands remain in this common image, while most uncorrelated noise details are filtered out. Third, the
visual band is assigned to the green channel and, after multiplication with a constant (typically 1.6) also to the blue
channel. Fourth, the brightness and colors of this intermediate false color image are renormalized by adjusting its first
order statistics to those of a representative reference scene. The result of these four steps is a fused color image, with
naturalistic colors (bluish sky and grayish water), in which small targets are clearly visible.
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