Multimodal Medical Image Fusion in Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform Domain

Periyavattam Shanmugam Gomathi,Bhuvanesh Kalaavathi

doi:10.4236/cs.2016.78139

Abstract

Multimodal medical image fusion is a powerful tool for diagnosing diseases in medical field. The main objective is to capture the relevant information from input images into a single output image, which plays an important role in clinical applications. In this paper, an image fusion technique for the fusion of multimodal medical images is proposed based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform. The proposed technique uses the Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) to decompose the images into lowpass and highpass subbands. The lowpass and highpass subbands are fused by using mean based and variance based fusion rules. The reconstructed image is obtained by taking Inverse Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (INSCT) on fused subbands. The experimental results on six pairs of medical images are compared in terms of entropy, mean, standard deviation, QAB/F as performance parameters. It reveals that the proposed image fusion technique outperforms the existing image fusion techniques in terms of quantitative and qualitative outcomes of the images. The percentage improvement in entropy is 0% - 40%, mean is 3% - 42%, standard deviation is 1% - 42%, QAB/Fis 0.4% - 48% in proposed method comparing to conventional methods for six pairs of medical images.

Highlights

The image fusion is the process of combining two or more images to form a single fused image which can provide more reliable and accurate information
3) The coefficients of low frequency subband of Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) are selected by Equation (1) and Equation (2). 4) The coefficients of high frequency subbands of NSCT are selected by Equation (3) and Equation (4). 5) Perform the Inverse NSCT (INSCT) with the combined coefficients obtained from steps 3 and 4
A multimodal medical image fusion method is proposed based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT), which consists of three steps

Summary

Introduction

The image fusion is the process of combining two or more images to form a single fused image which can provide more reliable and accurate information. A multimodal medical image fusion technique is proposed based on NSCT. Is carried out by fusion experiments on different multimodality medical image pairs Both qualitative and quantitative image analysis reveals that the proposed framework provides a better fusion results compared to the conventional image fusion techniques. NSCT is a shift invariant, multi-scale and multi-directional transform which has a very vibrant implementation It is obtained by using the Non-subsampled Pyramid Filter Bank (NSP or NSPFB) and the Non-subsampled Directional Filter Bank (NSDFB). NSDFB allows the direction decomposition with k levels in each high-frequency subbands from NSPFB and produces 2 k directional subbands with the same size as the source images. Step 3: The fused image is constructed by performing an inverse NSCT to the selected coefficients obtained from Step 2

Proposed Medical Image Fusion Method

Fusion of Low Frequency Subbands

Fusion of High Frequency Subbands

Results and Discussion

Conclusion