Advances in Optical Technologies
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 546808, 18 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/546808
Research Article

Spatial, Temporal, and Interchannel Image Data Fusion for Long-Distance Terrestrial Observation Systems

Barak Fishbain, Leonid P. Yaroslavsky, and Ianir Ideses

Department of Physical Electronics, School of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978, Israel

Received 14 May 2007; Revised 24 October 2007; Accepted 16 December 2007

Academic Editor: Michael A. Fiddy

Copyright © 2008 Barak Fishbain et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents methods for intrachannel and interchannel fusion of thermal and visual sensors used in long-distance terrestrial observation systems. Intrachannel spatial and temporal fusion mechanisms used for image stabilization, super-resolution, denoising, and deblurring are supplemented by interchannel data fusion of visual- and thermal-range channels for generating fused videos intended for visual analysis by a human operator. Tests on synthetic, as well as on real-life, video sequences have confirmed the potential of the suggested methods.