Mapping of visible to IR data for scene matching

Scene matching has become a challenging problem due to multi-temporal and multi-modal image acquisition. There is no direct and linear relation between EO (Electro-optical) and IR (Infra-red) images, which are required to be matched. In this paper, we propose a statistical technique of mapping EO to IR data by transformation function deduced from their gray level distribution. As the proposed technique is statistical and deals with multi-modal data, MI index (Mutual Information) and its variants are more appropriate similarity measures in this case. Therefore, we have used mutual information as a measure of statistical dependence between the two images. Results of MI shows that technique is effective in mapping visible to IR spectrum.