Image Fusion Improves Situational Awareness,
Abstract
Two recently developed false color image fusion techniques, the TNO fusion scheme and the MIT fusion scheme, are applied to visual and thermal images of military relevant scenarios. The scenes represent 3 different scenarios that simulate military surveillance tasks. The images are registered around sunrise. At this time, the contrast in both image modalities is low. However, the visual images still provide a sufficient amount of detail to perceive the spatial structure of the scene. The thermal images clearly depict objects with large temperature contrast like persons, but they do not correctly represent the spatial context. The composite images produced by both fusion schemes clearly represent all details in their correct spatial context. An observer experiment is performed to test if the increased amount of detail in the fused images can yield an improved observer performance in a task that requires a certain amount of situational awareness. The task that is devised involves the localization of a person in the displayed scene relative to some characteristic details that provide the spatial context. The results show that observers can indeed determine the relative location of a person in a scene with a significantly higher accuracy when they perform with fused images, compared to the individual image modalities. The MIT color fusion scheme yields the best overall performance (i.e. an accuracy that is significantly higher than that obtained with images fused according to the TNO scheme and with the original images). Even the most simple TNO fusion scheme yields an observer performance that is better than that obtained for the individual (thermal and visual) images.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 31, 1996
- Accession Number
- ADA320762
Entities
People
- A. Toet
- J. K. Ijspeert
- M. J. Van Dorresteijn