Fusion of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and forward looking infrared (FLIR) images is an important subject for aerospace and sensor surveillance. This paper presents a scheme to achieve a natural color image based on the contours feature of SAR and the target region feature of FLIR so that the overall scene recognition and situational awareness can be improved. The SAR and FLIR images are first decomposed into steerable pyramids, and the contour maps in the SAR image and the region maps in the FLIR image are calculated. The contour and region features are fused at each level of the steerable pyramids. A color image is then formed by transferring daytime color to the monochromic image by using the natural color transfer technique. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in providing a color fusion of SAR and FLIR images.

© 2005 Chinese Optics Letters

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