Multimodal Medical Image Fusion using NSCT and DWT Fusion Frame Work

Abstract

Image fusion is the process, which gathers significant details from two or more images. In the image fusion important information is selected from multiple images. Implementation of fusion of images is carried out either in spatial or in transforms domains. In this work, fusion is done in both domains to get better performance. Energy of decomposed bands of NSCT is used to select important bands in NSCT based image fusion. Energy of decomposed bands of DWT is used to select important bands in DWT based image fusion. Fused images of NSCT and DWT are further fused by using spatial domain technique. In spatial fusion ESOP values are taken into consideration to perform fusion. Experiments are done on several medical images .Experiments show that, the proposed method is giving perceptually meaningful fused images. Image metrics like entropy, edge based similarity measure and quality of mutual information have been used for the assessment of performance of the work. In this research work, two medical images (CT, MRI), after pre-processing, will be merged according to the wavelet and NSCT transformations using energy fusion techniques to generate two independent fusion images that will be merged again using spatial domain to get the desired output. In this way the large amount of comprehensive information can be presented in the merged image, all the comprehensive information obtained from the two medical images appears in the final output. The experimental outcomes on different CT and MRI images are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Image fusion has been implemented in the various applications like remote sensing, space research, defence, medical imaging etc. The performance parameters show remarkable improvements.