Multifocus image fusion based on waveatom transform

Abstract

Multifocus image fusion has emerged as a challenging research area due to the availability of various image-capturing devices. The optical lenses that are widely utilized in image-capturing devices have limited ‘depth-of-focus’ and, therefore, only the objects that lie within a particular depth remain ‘in-focus’, whereas all the other objects go ‘out-of-focus’. In order to obtain an image where all the objects are well focused, multifocus image fusion method based on waveatom transform is proposed. The core idea is to decompose all input images using waveatom transform and perform fusion of resultant waveatom coefficients. The waveatom coefficients with higher visibility, corresponding to sharper image intensities, are used to perform the process of image fusion. Finally, the fused image is obtained by performing inverse waveatom transform. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by performing fusion on different sets of multifocus images and comparing the results of the proposed method to the results of existing image fusion methods.