Coupled Spectral–Spatial Fusion-Enabled Multi-Scale Panoramic Imaging

Conventional imaging systems often suffer from a coupled limitation of narrow field of view, single modality, and insufficient effective resolution. Wide-angle imaging preserves scene context but compresses distant or small-scale targets into limited pixels, while narrow-field imaging improves details at the cost of global perception. Moreover, single-modal visible imaging is sensitive to illumination and contrast variations, whereas infrared imaging lacks fine spatial texture. To increase information at the imaging source, we propose coupled spectral–spatial fusion-enabled multi-scale panoramic imaging, a dual-field-of-view (FOV) visible–infrared framework for wide-field high-resolution perception. Two imaging units acquire paired visible and infrared images from adjacent overlapping views. For each view, a visible–infrared fusion super-resolution model integrates visible structural details with infrared radiative cues to reconstruct a high-resolution fused image. A multi-scale stitching algorithm then extracts robust features, estimates cross-view correspondences, and merges the two fused images into a large-FOV panoramic result. Outdoor experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves local contrast, suppresses pixelation artifacts, enhances readable fine details, and expands the observable field of view, providing an effective route toward multimodal panoramic imaging.