METHOD FOR RED GREEN BLUE (RGB) STEREO SENSOR FUSION

Red-Green-Blue color-coding of overlaid registered stereo pair imagery from different spectral regions (for example, near-, mid-, and far-infrared) can be used to derive depth perception information. The human preattentive vision process uses coarse spatial structure in the scene to fuse the images for the detection of depth and motion cues. Optimization is accomplished by assigning green to the lowest spatial frequency content image, then red to the next lowest, and finally blue. If the fusion of one of the colored imagery layers produces depth perception information in one portion of the scene whereas the other two colored layers do not, the human mind can retain the information from this color and discard the inputs from the other two colors as noise. The same is true for the other two colors. Human color discrimination and depth perception are combined to greatly enhance preattentive object recognition in the fused stereo pair imagery.