Multi-focus image fusion using VOL and EOL in DCT domain

The purpose of multi-focus image fusion is gathering the essential information and the focused parts from the input multi-focus images into a single image. These multifocused images are captured with different depths of focus of cameras. Multi-focus image fusion is very time-saving and appropriate in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain, especially when JPEG images are used in visual sensor networks (VSN). The previous works in DCT domain have some errors in selection of the suitable divided blocks according to their criterion for measurement of the block contrast. In this paper, we used variance of Laplacian (VOL) and energy of Laplacian (EOL) as criterion to measure the contrast of image. Also in this paper, the EOL and VOL calculations directly in DCT domain are prepared using vector processing. We developed four matrices which calculate the Laplacian of block easily in DCT domain. Our works greatly reduce error due to unsuitable block selection. The results of the proposed algorithms are compared with the previous algorithms in order to demonstrate the superiority of the output image quality in the proposed methods. The several JPEG multi-focus images are used in experiments and their fused image by our proposed methods and the other algorithms are compared with different measurement criteria. Keywords—multi-focus; image fusion; VSN; DCT; energy; variance; laplacian