A novel multi-focus image fusion approach based on image decomposition.

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]