A new multi-focus image fusion algorithm based on Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform

In this paper, a new multi-focus image fusion algorithm based on the Nonsubsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) is proposed. As a more effective multi-resolution analysis method, NSCT can give a better performance in image processing than the existing methods. Because Human Visual system(HVS) can only be sensitivity to regional characteristic rather than single pixel characteristic, region variance - maximum-based rule and region energy- maximum-based rule are employed to obtain high-frequency and low-frequency coefficients. In the experiments, we compared this strategy with wavelet-based algorithm and contourlet transform -based algorithm. Experimental results show that the fused result based on NSCT can achieve a better performance than the other algorithm.