Search

Multi-focus image fusion is an effective technique to integrate the relevant information from a set of images with the same scene, into a comprehensive image. The fused image would be more informative than any of the source images. In this paper, a novel fusion scheme based on image cartoon-texture decomposition is proposed. Multi-focus source images are decomposed into cartoon content and texture content by an improved iterative re-weighted decomposition algorithm. It can achieve rapid convergence and naturally approximates the morphological structure components. The proper fusion rules are constructed to fuse the cartoon content and the texture content, respectively. Finally, the fused cartoon and texture components are combined to obtain the all-in-focus image. This fusion processing can preserve morphological structure information from source images and performs few artifacts or additional noise. Our experimental results have clearly shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms many state-of-the-art methods, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image fusion can integrate complementary and relevant information of source images captured by multiple sensors into a unitary synthetic image. The compressive sensing-based (CS) fusion approach can greatly reduce the processing speed and guarantee the quality of the fused image by integrating fewer non-zero coefficients. However, there are two main limitations in the conventional CS-based fusion approach. Firstly, directly fusing sensing measurements may bring greater uncertain results with high reconstruction error. Secondly, using single fusion rule may result in the problems of blocking artifacts and poor fidelity. In this paper, a novel image fusion approach based on CS is proposed to solve those problems. The non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) method is utilized to decompose the source images. The dual-layer Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) model is used to integrate low-pass subbands; while an edge-retention based fusion rule is proposed to fuse high-pass subbands. The sparse coefficients are fused before being measured by Gaussian matrix. The fused image is accurately reconstructed by Compressive Sampling Matched Pursuit algorithm (CoSaMP). Experimental results demonstrate that the fused image contains abundant detailed contents and preserves the saliency structure. These also indicate that our proposed method achieves better visual quality than the current state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An appropriate fusion of infrared and visible images can integrate their complementary information and obtain more reliable and better description of the environmental conditions. Compressed sensing theory, as a low signal sampling and compression method based on the sparsity of signal under a certain transformation, is widely used in various fields. Applying to the image fusion applications, only a part of sparse coefficients are needed to be fused. Furthermore, the fused sparse coefficients can be used to accurately reconstruct the fused image. The CS-based fusion approach can greatly reduce the computational complexity and simultaneously enhance the quality of the fused image. In this paper, an improved image fusion scheme based on compressive sensing is presented. This proposed approach can preserve more detail information, such as edges, lines and contours in comparison to the conventional transform-based image fusion approaches. In the proposed approach, the sparse coefficients of the source images are obtained by discrete wavelet transform. The low and high coefficients of infrared and visible images are fused by an improved entropy weighted fusion rule and a max-abs-based fusion rule, respectively. The fused image is reconstructed by a compressive sampling matched pursuit algorithm after local linear projection using a random Gaussian matrix. Several comparative experiments are conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed image fusion scheme can achieve better image fusion quality than the existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel multi-focus image fusion approach is presented. Firstly, a joint dictionary is constructed by combining several sub-dictionaries which are adaptively learned from source images using K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm. The proposed dictionary constructing method does not need any prior knowledge, and no external pre-collected training image data is required either. Secondly, sparse coefficients are estimated by the batch orthogonal matching pursuit (batch-OMP) algorithm. It can effectively accelerate the sparse coding process. Finally, a maximum weighted multi-norm fusion rule is adopted to accurately reconstruct fused image from sparse coefficients and the joint dictionary. It can enable the fused image to contain most important information of the source images. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of the proposed method, comparison experiments are conducted on several multi-focus images and manually blurred images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-modality medical image fusion technology can integrate the complementary information of different modality medical images, obtain more precise, reliable and better description of lesions. Dictionary learning based image fusion draws a great attention in researchers and scientists, for its high performance. The standard learning scheme uses entire image for dictionary learning. However, in medical images, the informative region takes a small proportion of the whole image. Most of the image patches have limited and redundant information. Taking all the image patches for dictionary learning brings lots of unvalued and redundant information, which can influence the medical image fusion quality. In this paper, a novel dictionary learning approach is proposed for image fusion. The proposed approach consists of three steps. Firstly, a novel image patches sampling scheme is proposed to obtain the informative patches. Secondly, a local density peaks based clustering algorithm is conducted to classify the image patches with similar image structure information into several patch groups. Each patch group is trained to a compact sub-dictionary by K-SVD. Finally the sub-dictionaries are combined to a complete, informative and compact dictionary. In this dictionary,only important and useful information which can effectively describe the medical image are selected. To show the efficiency of the proposed dictionary learning approach, the sparse coefficient vectors are estimated by a simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (SOMP) algorithm with the trained dictionary, and fused by max-L1 rules. The comparative experimental results and analyses reveal that the proposed method achieves better image fusion quality than existing state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]