Image Fusion Method based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform

Considering human visual system and characteristics of images, a novel image fusion strategy is presented for panchromatic high resolution image and multispectral image in non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. The NSCT can give an asymptotic optimal representation of edges and contours in image by virtue of its characteristics of good multiresolution, shiftinvariance, and high directionality. An intensity component addition strategy based on NMF algorithm is introduced into NSCT domain to preserve spatial resolution and color content. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can not only reduce computational complexities, but achieve better performances than other mentioned techniques both in visual point and statistics compared with the traditional principle component analysis (PCA) method, intensity-hue-saturation (IHS) transform technique, wavelet transform weighted fusion method, corresponding wavelet transform-based fusion method, and contourlet transformbased fusion method.