Abstract: This paper evaluates different wavelet-based cross-spectral image fusion strategies adopted to merge visible and infrared images. The objective is to find the best setup independently of the evaluation metric used to measure the performance. Quantitative performance results are obtained with state of the art approaches together with adaptations proposed in the current work. The options evaluated in the current work result from the combination of different setups in the wavelet image decomposition stage together with different fusion strategies for the final merging stage that generates the resulting representation. Most of the approaches evaluate results according to the application for which they are intended for. Sometimes a human observer is selected to judge the quality of the obtained results. In the current work, quantitative values are considered in order to find correlations between setups and performance of obtained results; these correlations can be used to define a criteria for selecting the best fusion strategy for a given pair of cross-spectral images. The whole procedure is evaluated with a large set of correctly registered visible and infrared image pairs, including both Near InfraRed (NIR) and LongWave InfraRed (LWIR).

Abstract: The simultaneous use of images from different spectra can be helpful to improve the performance of many com- puter vision tasks. The core idea behind the usage of cross- spectral approaches is to take advantage of the strengths of each spectral band providing a richer representation of a scene, which cannot be obtained with just images from one spectral band. In this work we tackle the cross-spectral image similarity problem by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore three different CNN archi- tectures to compare the similarity of cross-spectral image patches. Specifically, we train each network with images from the visible and the near-infrared spectrum, and then test the result with two public cross-spectral datasets. Ex- perimental results show that CNN approaches outperform the current state-of-art on both cross-spectral datasets. Ad- ditionally, our experiments show that some CNN architec- tures are capable of generalizing between different cross- spectral domains.

Abstract: When an autonomous vehicle is traveling through some scenario it receives a continuous stream of sensor data. This sensor data arrives in an asynchronous fashion and often contains overlapping or redundant information. Thus, it is not trivial how a representation of the environment observed by the vehicle can be created and updated over time. This paper presents a novel methodology to compute an incremental 3D representation of a scenario from 3D range measurements. We propose to use macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scenario. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Furthermore, we propose mechanisms designed to update the geometric polygonal primitives over time whenever fresh sensor data is collected. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene, and that it is computationally very efficient when compared to other reconstruction techniques.

Abstract: This paper presents a new feature descriptor suitable to the task of matching features points between images with nonlinear intensity variations. This includes image pairs with significant illuminations changes, multi-modal image pairs and multi-spectral image pairs. The proposed method describes the neighbourhood of feature points combining frequency and spatial information using multi-scale and multi-oriented Log- Gabor filters. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed approach and also the improvements with respect to the state of the art.