A visible-light and infrared video database for performance evaluation of video/image fusion methods

In general, the fusion of visible-light and infrared images produces a composite representation where both data are pictured in a single image. The successful development of image/video fusion algorithms relies on realistic infrared/visible-light datasets. To the best of our knowledge, there is a particular shortage of databases with registered and synchronized videos from the infrared and visible-light spectra suitable for image/video fusion research. To address this need we recorded an image/video fusion database using infrared and visible-light cameras under varying illumination conditions. Moreover, different scenarios have been defined to better challenge the fusion methods, with various contexts and contents providing a wide variety of meaningful data for fusion purposes, including non-planar scenes, where objects appear on different depth planes. However, there are several difficulties in creating datasets for research in infrared/visible-light image fusion. Camera calibration, registration, and synchronization can be listed as important steps of this task. In particular, image registration between imagery from sensors of different spectral bands imposes additional difficulties, as it is very challenging to solve the correspondence problem between such images. Motivated by these challenges, this work introduces a novel spatiotemporal video registration method capable of generating registered and temporally aligned infrared/visible-light video sequences. The proposed workflow improves the registration accuracy when compared to the state-of-the art. By applying the proposed methodology to the recorded database we have generated the visible-light and infrared video database for image fusion, a publicly available database to be used by the research community to test and benchmark fusion schemes.