Morphological image fusion using the extracted image regions and details based on multi-scale top-hat transform and toggle contrast operator

Abstract

Remaining useful information of the original images in the fusion image is very important in image fusion. To be effective for image fusion, a multi-scale top-hat transform and toggle contrast operator based algorithm using the extracted image regions and details is proposed in this paper. Top-hat transform could extract image regions, and operations constructed from toggle contrast operator could extract image details. Moreover, multi-scale top-hat transform and toggle contrast operator could be used to extract the effective image regions and details at multi-scales of the original images. Then, the extracted image regions and details are imported into the final fusion image to form the effective fusion result. Thus, the proposed multi-scale top-hat transform and toggle contrast operator based algorithm is an effective image fusion algorithm to keep more useful image information. The combination of the top-hat transform and toggle contrast operator for effective image fusion is the main contribution of this paper, which is the extension of the previous work using only the toggle contrast operator for edge preserved image fusion. Experimental results on multi-modal and multi-focus images show that the proposed algorithm performs very well for image fusion.