IETAFusion: An illumination enhancement and target‐aware infrared and visible image fusion network for security system of smart city

Abstract

AbstractIn the environmental security monitoring of smart cities, the infrared and visible image fusion method deployed on intelligent systems based on cloud and fog computing plays a vital role in providing enhanced images for target detection systems. However, the fusion quality can be significantly influenced by the illumination of the monitoring scenario in visible images. Therefore, conventional methods typically suffer a severe performance drop under the condition of insufficient illumination. To tackle this issue, we propose an illumination enhancement and target‐aware fusion method‐based on artificial intelligence, which breaks the boundaries between the task of illumination enhancement and image fusion and provide a fusion result with better visual perception in nighttime scene. Specifically, we use a light‐weight contrast enhancement module restore the brightness of the visible image. Moreover, a Swin Transformer‐based backbone network is utilized to facilitate information exchange between the source images and enhance the capabilities of target awareness. Finally, the fused images are reconstructed by the contrast‐texture retention module and reconstructor. The extensive experiments indicate that the proposed approach achieves improved performance both in human perception and quantitative analysis compared with the state‐of‐the‐art methods.