An Improved Medical Image Fusion Method Based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform

Abstract

In order to further improve the quality of medical image fusion,an improved medical image fusion method, based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT),is proposed in the paper. A fusion rule based on the improved pulse coupled neural network (PCNN) is adopted in low frequency sub-band coefficient. Because human visual is more sensitive to all local region pixels instead of single pixel,it is more reasonable that the region information stimulates PCNN instead of single pixel. Each neuron of PCNN model is stimulated by the region spatial frequency of low frequency sub-band coefficient .Low frequency sub-band coefficient is determined by the times of firing. When choosing the bandpass directional sub-band coefficients, the directional characteristics of NSCT has been made best use of in the paper.A fusion rule based on sum-modified Laplacian is presented in bandpass directional sub-band cosfficients.The experiment results show that the proposed method can greatly improve the quality of fusion image compared with traditional fusion methods.