A new criterion on wavelet coefficient-based fusion

The important aspect of image fusion is making proper fusion rules. On the base of wavelet transform, the neighboring relation of low-frequency wavelet coefficients and the directional characteristic of the high-frequency coefficients are discussed and analyzed. By analyzing the internal relations between the statistics and the content of the images, according to the specific circumstances of each image, two new image fusion criteria are proposed, and a novel fusion algorithm between multi-spectral and panchromatic images is realized. Visual and statistical analyses proved that the fusion rules and algorithm improved significantly fusion quality when compared to conventional IHS and wavelet fusion methods.