An edge enhancement-based fusion method of infrared and visible images in low light

The combination of infrared and visible images can result in the generation of a single image with a high degree of detail and important targets in a variety of scenes, which is beneficial for human recognition. However, in low-light environments, low-intensity visible images tend to blur valuable information, which is often overlooked. This results in the loss of important information. While existing methods address the issue of low illumination and highlight the illumination, a considerable amount of structural information is lost when adjusting illumination, resulting in the omission of texture details. To solve aforementioned problems, we proposes a method for edge enhancement in low-illumination scenes. This approach aims to minimise the loss of edge information while simultaneously enhancing the illumination, thereby producing fusion images with enhanced texture detail. The initial step involves the design of an illumination enhancement module, which is employed to segregate the compromised illumination present from the scene information. Given the fact that image edge information has the capacity for effective structural modeling, a low-light visible image edge extraction network is designed to model structural information, which can accurately highlight important structural information and insert it in fused images. The results produced by this method have better visual perception and minimize structural loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the method outperforms SOTA methods in term of visual quality and quantitative metrics.