A Novel Image Fusion Method for Multi-focus Image Fusion Based on the Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform and Multi-scale Statistic

Abstract

A novel image fusion method based on the Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and multiscale statistic for multi-focus image fusion is proposed. The objective of multi-focus image fusion is to combine the clear part of different source images with the same scene to a single image, and how to get a better focus measurement is the key to the question. The paper managed to analysis the inputs image in NSCT domain with multi-scale statistical features and gives a novel fusion strategy to select the coefficients. The multi-scale average gradient is applied on the low frequency coefficients. And all of the high frequency coefficients of the same position were selected from the same source image decided by the average of the multi-scale energy value of these subbands. The comparative result with the other methods based on Wavelet Transform (WT), Contourlet Transform (CT) and NSCT shows that the proposed method exacts the most information from the source images and achieves better performance both in the subjective visual perception and quantitative metrics.