A Spatial Domain and Frequency Domain Integrated Approach to Fusion Multifocus Images

A spatial domain and frequency domain integrated approach was proposed to fusion multifocus images. The proposed multifocus image fusion algorithm was composed of computing Sum-modified-Laplacian(SML) for each focus image, stationary wavelet transform(SWT) decomposition, image fusion and inverse SWT. Firstly, two initial binary decision maps were created by setting two thresholds to the SML difference between two focus images. Secondly, two different focus images were decomposed using SWT transform separately, then in the SWT domain of the two transformed images, the new SWT coefficients were acquired by adopting a simple fusion rule. Low-bands coefficients were integrated using the weighted average, and high-bands coefficients were integrated using choose max and the two SML maps. Finally the fused image was obtained by performing an inverse SWT transform. Two groups of different focus images were performed to evaluate the performance of our method. Experimental results showed that our algorithm can provide better performance than the wavelet method from both visual perception and quantitative analysis.