An effective image fusion rule based on Consistency Checking

This paper puts forward a novel fusion rule for multiscale image decomposition: PCA is applied to approximation images and Consistency Checking to detail images after energy selection. Improving the continuity of the images, this rule overcomes some weaknesses of the traditional approaches. In image fusion applications, especially multisource images, it seems more meaningful to combine regions rather than pixels. The fusion algorithms based on the traditional fusion rules that we have discussed in section 2 are mainly pixel-based approaches where each individual coefficient of the multi-scale decomposition (or possibly the coefficients in a small fixed window) is treated more or less independently. As an intermediate step from pixel-based toward region-based fusion schemes, this paper proposed the Consistency Checking approach. Such approach has the additional advantage that the fusion process becomes more robust and may help to circumvent some of the well-known drawbacks of pixel-based techniques.