A Comparative Study of Wavelet-Based Image Fusion with a Novel Fusion Rule

Abstract

Abstract-Image fusion is the process of combining information of interest in two or more images of a scene into a single highly informative image. Generally, the multi-resolution image fusion based on the wavelet transform performs better on diverse images than traditional methods. Therefore, a comparative study of wavelet-based image fusion with different wavelet families and fusion methods are far-reaching to guide people in their applications. On the other hand, in this paper, a novel fusion rule based on focus measure and local contrast measure is proposed to analyze the information in images and help selecting appropriate information from different source images to obtain a fused image. Experimental results on various wavelet functions and fusion rules demonstrate that the proposed fusion approach outperforms traditional methods in real images.Index Terms-Fusion rule, image fusion, local contrast measure, wavelet transform.