Issues and challenges in the development of a commercialised image fusion system

Abstract

Image fusion technology is becoming increasingly used within military systems. However, the migration of the technology to non-defence applications has been limited, both in terms of functionality and processing performance. In this paper, the development of a low-cost automatic registration and adaptive image fusion system is described. In order to fully exploit commercially available processor hardware, an alternative registration and image fusion approach has been developed and the results of this are presented. Additionally, the software design offers interface flexibility and user programmability and these features are illustrated through a number of different applications.