Abstract
In recent years, advancements in machine learning capabilities have allowed it to see widespread adoption for tasks such as object detection, image classification, and anomaly detection. However, despite their promise, a limitation lies in the fact that a network's performance quality is based on the data which it receives. A well-trained network will still have poor performance if the subsequent data supplied to it contains artifacts, out of focus regions, or other visual distortions. Under normal circumstances, images of the same scene captured from differing points of focus, angles, or modalities must be separately analysed by the network, despite possibly containing overlapping information such as in the case of images of the same scene captured from different angles, or irrelevant information such as images captured from infrared sensors which can capture thermal information well but not topographical details. This factor can potentially add significantly to the computational time and resources required to utilize the network without providing any additional benefit. In this study, we plan to explore using image fusion techniques to assemble multiple images of the same scene into a single image that retains the most salient key features of the individual source images while discarding overlapping or irrelevant data that does not provide any benefit to the network. Utilizing this image fusion step before inputting a dataset into the network, the number of images would be significantly reduced with the potential to improve the classification performance accuracy by enhancing images while discarding irrelevant and overlapping regions.