A wavelet-based image fusion tutorial

The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. L. Jañez Head of the Instituto Complutense de Imagen y Telemedicina, E. Ortiz co-worker in the same Institution, and Dr. Carreras Head of PET Institute, for his support in the medical image fusion applications. They have provided us with the medical images shown in this work. The constructive recommendations provided by the reviewers are also gratefully acknowledged.
The objective of image fusion is to combine information from multiple images of the same scene. The result of image fusion is a new image which is more suitable for human and machine perception or further image-processing tasks such as segmentation, feature extraction and object recognition. Different fusion methods have been proposed in literature, including multiresolution analysis. This paper is an image fusion tutorial based on wavelet decomposition, i.e. a multiresolution image fusion approach. We can fuse images with the same or different resolution level, i.e. range sensing, visual CCD, infrared, thermal or medical. The tutorial performs a synthesis between the multi scale-decomposition-based image approach (Proc. IEEE 87 (8) (1999) 1315), the ARSIS concept (Photogramm. Eng. Remote Sensing 66 (1) (2000) 49) and a multisensor scheme (Graphical Models Image Process. 57 (3) (1995) 235). Some image fusion examples illustrate the proposed fusion approach. A comparative analysis is carried out against classical existing strategies, including those of multiresolution.
Sección Deptal. de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática (Físicas)
Fac. de Ciencias Físicas
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