Noisy Image Fusion Research Articles

Fusion of Infrared and Visible Images Based on Optimized Low-Rank Matrix Factorization with Guided Filtering

In recent years, image fusion has been a research hotspot. However, it is still a big challenge to balance the problems of noiseless image fusion and noisy image fusion. In order to improve the weak performance and low robustness of existing image fusion algorithms in noisy images, an infrared and visible image fusion algorithm based on optimized low-rank matrix factorization with guided filtering is proposed. First, the minimized error reconstruction factorization is introduced into the low-rank matrix, which effectively enhances the optimization performance, and obtains the base image with good filtering performance. Then using the base image as the guide image, the source image is decomposed into the high-frequency layer containing detail information and noise, and the low-frequency layer containing energy information through guided filtering. According to the noise intensity, the sparse reconstruction error is adaptively obtained to fuse the high-frequency layers, and the weighted average strategy is utilized to fuse the low-frequency layers. Finally, the fusion image is obtained by reconstructing the pre-fused high-frequency layer and the pre-fused low-frequency layer. The comparative experiments show that the proposed algorithm not only has good performance for noise-free images, but more importantly, it can effectively deal with the fusion of noisy images.

An Improved Pigeon-Inspired Optimization for Multi-focus Noisy Image Fusion

An Improved Pigeon-Inspired Optimization for Multi-focus Noisy Image Fusion

A Novel Multi-Modality Image Simultaneous Denoising and Fusion Method Based on Sparse Representation

Multi-modality image fusion applied to improve image quality has drawn great attention from researchers in recent years. However, noise is actually generated in images captured by different types of imaging sensors, which can seriously affect the performance of multi-modality image fusion. As the fundamental method of noisy image fusion, source images are denoised first, and then the denoised images are fused. However, image denoising can decrease the sharpness of source images to affect the fusion performance. Additionally, denoising and fusion are processed in separate processing modes, which causes an increase in computation cost. To fuse noisy multi-modality image pairs accurately and efficiently, a multi-modality image simultaneous fusion and denoising method is proposed. In the proposed method, noisy source images are decomposed into cartoon and texture components. Cartoon-texture decomposition not only decomposes source images into detail and structure components for different image fusion schemes, but also isolates image noise from texture components. A Gaussian scale mixture (GSM) based sparse representation model is presented for the denoising and fusion of texture components. A spatial domain fusion rule is applied to cartoon components. The comparative experimental results confirm the proposed simultaneous image denoising and fusion method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations.

Joint image fusion and denoising via three-layer decomposition and sparse representation

Image fusion has been received much attentions in recent years. However, solving both noise-free image fusion and noise-perturbed image fusion problems remains a big challenge. To solve the weak performance and low computational efficiency for current image fusion methods when dealing with the case of noisy source images, an image fusion method based on three-layer decomposition and sparse representation is proposed in this paper. In view of the high-pass characteristics of noise, the source image is first decomposed into the high-frequency and low-frequency components, and the sparse reconstruct error parameter is adaptively designed according with the noise level, so as to realize the fusion and denoising for high-frequency components simultaneously. To make full use of the details and energy in the low-frequency component, the structure–texture​ decomposition model is carried out and two fusion rules are carefully designed to fuse them. The fused image can be reconstructed by the perfused high-frequency, low-frequency structure and low-frequency texture layers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively address the clean and noisy image fusion problems, and yield better performance than some state-of-the-art methods in terms of subjective visual and quantitative evaluations.

Noise-robust image fusion with low-rank sparse decomposition guided by external patch prior

It is challenging to simultaneously achieve noise suppression and fine detail preservation in noisy image fusion. To address this challenge, we propose a novel strategy for noisy image fusion. Assuming that an image can be modeled as a superposition of low-rank and sparse (LR-and-S) components, we develop a novel discriminative dictionary learning algorithm to construct two dictionaries so as to decompose the input image into LR-and-S components. Specifically, to make dictionary possess discriminative power, we enforce spatial morphology constraint on each dictionary. Furthermore, we develop within-class consistency constraint by exploiting the similarity of low-rank components and impose it on the coding coefficients to further improve the discriminative power of the learned dictionary. In image decomposition, external patch prior and internal self-similarity prior of an image are exploited to build image decomposition model, based on which the latent subspace for fusion and recovery is estimated by minimizing rank-regularization of the subspace learned via clustering of similar patches. To construct different components of fused result, we use l1-norm maximization rule to fuse the decomposed components. Finally, the fused image is obtained by adding the fused components together. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective quality assessment and subjective visual perception.

Discriminative Dictionary Learning-Based Multiple Component Decomposition for Detail-Preserving Noisy Image Fusion

How to effectively preserve the fine-scale details of the image when noises are suppressed is one of the great challenges faced by scholars in the field of noisy image fusion. The traditional noisy image fusion method tends to smooth the fine-scale structures excessively. To overcome the oversmoothing issue, we develop a novel method that can perform fusion, denoising, and preservation of fine structures simultaneously. In this method, the image is modeled as a superposition of coarse structures and fine details. At the same time, a brand new strategy is developed to decompose the input image into coarse and fine components for the further exploitation of afforded discrimination by learned dictionary. Specifically, to preserve the coarse-scale structures and recover the fine details, a novel discriminative dictionary-learning algorithm is proposed to utilize weighted nuclear norm regularization and sparse constraint to characterize coarse structures and fine components, respectively. For image separation, we present a weighted Schatten sparse nuclear norm regularization and integrate it into the separation model to extract the coarse structures. To estimate the fine components submerged in the noise, we propose to exploit the image’s nonlocal self-similarity and develop gradient-preservation term based on the gradient histogram constraint. Finally, we develop an innovative fusion rule based on the activity level of the recovered patch to construct the fused coding coefficients of different components. Our experiments show that the proposed method has impressive subjective visual quality and objective metric performance.

Fusion of noisy images based on joint distribution model in dual‐tree complex wavelet domain

AbstractSource images are frequently corrupted by noise before fusion, which will lead to the quality decline of fused image and the inconvenience for subsequent observation. However, at present, most of the traditional medical image fusion scheme cannot be implemented in noisy environment. Besides, the existing fusion methods scarcely make full use of the dependencies between source images. In this research, a novel fusion algorithm based on the statistical properties of wavelet coefficients is proposed, which incorporates fusion and denoising simultaneously. In the proposed algorithm, the new saliency and matching measures are defined by two distributions: the marginal statistical distribution of single wavelet coefficient fit by the generalized Gaussian Distribution and joint distribution of dual source wavelet coefficients modeled by the anisotropic bivariate Laplacian model. Additionally, the bivariate shrinkage is introduced to develop a noise robust fusion method, and a moment‐based parameter estimation applied in the fusion scheme is also exploited in denoising method, which allows to achieve the consistency of fusion and denoising. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs very well on both noisy and noise‐free images from multimodal medical datasets (computerized tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, magnetic resonance angiography, etc.), outperforming the conventional methods in terms of both fusion quality and noise reduction.

Multifocus noisy image fusion using contourlet transform

Image fusion is a challenging area of research with a variety of applications. The process of image fusion collects information from different sources and combines them in a single composite image. The composite fused image can better describe the scene than any of the source images. In this paper, we have proposed a method for noisy image fusion in contourlet domain. The proposed method works equally well for fusion of noise free images. Contourlet transform is a multiscale, multidirectional transform with various aspect ratios. These properties make it more suitable for image fusion than other conventional transforms. In the proposed work, the fusion algorithm is combined with a denoising algorithm to reverse the effect of noise. In the proposed method, we have used a level dependent threshold that is based on standard deviation of contourlet coefficients, mean and median of the absolute contourlet coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in the presence of different types of noise. Performance of the proposed method is compared with principal components analysis and sharp fusion based methods as well as other fusion methods based on variants of wavelet transform like dual tree complex wavelet transform, discrete wavelet transform, lifting wavelet transform, multiwavelet transform, stationary wavelet transform and pyramid transform using six standard quantitative quality metrics (entropy, standard deviation, edge strength, fusion factor, sharpness and peak signal to noise ratio). The combined qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the experimental results shows that the proposed method performs better than other methods.

Contrast-based fusion of noisy images using discrete wavelet transform

Development of efficient fusion algorithms is becoming increasingly important for obtaining a more informative image from several source images captured by different modes of imaging systems or multiple sensors. Since noise is inherent in practical imaging systems or sensors, an integrated approach of image fusion and noise reduction is essential. The discrete wavelet transform has been significantly successful in the development of fusion algorithms for noise-free images as well as in image denoising algorithms. A novel contrast-based image fusion algorithm is proposed in the wavelet domain for noisy source images. Novel features of the proposed fusion method are the noise reduction taking into consideration the linear dependency among the noisy source images and introducing an appropriate modification of the magnitude of the wavelet coefficients depending on the noise strength. Experiments are carried out on a number of commonly-used greyscale and colour test images to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Results show that the performance of the proposed fusion method is better than that of other methods in terms of several frequently-used metrics, such as the structural similarity, peak signal-to-noise ratio and cross-entropy, as well as in the visual quality, even in the case of correlated noise.

Non-Gaussian model-based fusion of noisy images in the wavelet domain

This paper describes a new methodology for multimodal image fusion based on non-Gaussian statistical modelling of wavelet coefficients. Special emphasis is placed on the fusion of noisy images. The use of families of generalised Gaussian and alpha-stable distributions for modelling image wavelet coefficients is investigated and methods for estimating distribution parameters are proposed. Improved techniques for image fusion are developed, by incorporating these models into a weighted average image fusion algorithm. The proposed method has been shown to perform very well with both noisy and noise-free images from multimodal datasets, outperforming conventional methods in terms of fusion quality and noise reduction in the fused output.