Multiresolution Image Fusion Based on Wavelet Transform By Using a Novel Technique for Selection Coefficients

Today, image fusion as one kind of information integrated technology has played an important role in many fields. This paper presents a novel wavelet based technique for image fusion, which is developed by taking into account the physical meaning of the wavelet coefficients. The images to be fused are firstly decomposed into high frequency and low frequency bands by wavelet transform. Then, by considering the physical meaning of the coefficients, a new selection strategy that treats the coefficients in different ways is proposed. This strategy selects the coefficients of high frequency bands with a variance based scheme, while selects the coefficients of low frequency band with an edge based scheme. Finally, the fused image is constructed by an inverse wavelet transform performing on the combined coefficients from all frequency bands. The proposed method is validated and compared with some existing fusion methods. Experimental results can clearly indicate the superiority of the proposed method through visual inspection and objective fusion performance measurements.