Patent ID: 7940994

Claim:
An imaging apparatus, comprising: a first input image of a scene; a second input image of the scene; a first center-surround filter adapted to receive the first input image and to produce a first preprocessed image in response to the first input image; a second center-surround filter adapted to receive the second input image and to produce a second preprocessed image in response to the second input image; a first multi-scale center-surround filter comprising a plurality of center-surround filters each adapted to receive and process the first and second preprocessed images to produce respective first output images at different scales, each said filter separately applying a contrast enhancement operator to each pixel in the first and second preprocessed images and an adaptive normalization factor to the enhancement operation at a different scale, wherein the contrast enhancement operator is applied to center and surround regions around each pixel in said first and second preprocessed images and the adaptive normalization factor is extracted from a normalization region around each pixel from the same said image as the surround region, said normalization region being larger than said center and surround regions but smaller than the entirety of said first and second preprocessed images, said first multi-scale center-surround filter merging said first output images to produce at least a first component image of a fused image; and a display that displays the fused image.