The infrared and visible image fusion algorithm based on target separation and sparse representation

•The infrared target is detected based on firing times of PCNN.•DENCLUE is used to accurately locate the infrared target region.•The noise of the background region is suppressed based on sparse representation.•Different fusion rules are built according to the target and background region. Although the fused image of the infrared and visible image takes advantage of their complementary, the artifact of infrared targets and vague edges seriously interfere the fusion effect. To solve these problems, a fusion method based on infrared target extraction and sparse representation is proposed. Firstly, the infrared target is detected and separated from the background rely on the regional statistical properties. Secondly, DENCLUE (the kernel density estimation clustering method) is used to classify the source images into the target region and the background region, and the infrared target region is accurately located in the infrared image. Then the background regions of the source images are trained by Kernel Singular Value Decomposition (KSVD) dictionary to get their sparse representation, the details information is retained and the background noise is suppressed. Finally, fusion rules are built to select the fusion coefficients of two regions and coefficients are reconstructed to get the fused image. The fused image based on the proposed method not only contains a clear outline of the infrared target, but also has rich detail information.