Adopting and Implementation of Self Organizing Feature Map for Image Fusion

Abstract

A different image fusion algorithm based on self organizing feature map is proposed in this paper, aiming to produce quality images. Image Fusion is to integrate complementary and redundant information from multiple images of the same scene to create a single composite image that contains all the important features of the original images. The resulting fused image will thus be more suitable for human and machine perception or for further image processing tasks. The existing fusion techniques based on either direct operation on pixels or segments fail to produce fused images of the required quality and are mostly application based. The existing segmentation algorithms become complicated and time consuming when multiple images are to be fused. A new method of segmenting and fusion of gray scale images adopting Self organizing Feature Maps(SOM) is proposed in this paper. The Self Organizing Feature Maps is adopted to produce multiple slices of the source and reference images based on various combination of gray scale and can dynamically fused depending on the application. The proposed technique is adopted and analyzed for fusion of multiple images. The technique is robust in the sense that there will be no loss in information due to the property of Self Organizing Feature Maps; noise removal in the source images done during processing stage and fusion of multiple images is dynamically done to get the desired results. Experimental results demonstrate that, for the quality multifocus image fusion, the proposed method performs better than some popular image fusion methods in both subjective and objective qualities.