Abstract

Image fusion is the process of combining relevant information from two or more images into a single image. The component images are optically acquired in more than one spectral band (from visible to Long Wavelength Infrared) with the resultant image having more information than any of the individual images. The applications of fused video are primarily in Defense, and Homeland Security for the detection and tracking of targets, and in firefighting for seeing through smoke. Current state of the art fusion cameras encounter problems such as parallax error, video latency and color distortion which limits the performance of the fused video. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a system that utilizes single-window optics, as well as improved fusion electronics to overcome these issues.

© 2017 Optical Society of America