Comparison of EMD Based Image Fusion Methods

Image fusion involves merging two or more images in such a way as to retain the most desirable characteristics of each. When a color visible image is fused with infrared image, the desired result is a color image with natural color appearance and full information. In this paper, an introduction to empirical mode decomposition (EMD) theory and the results from three image fusion schemes based on EMD-complex EMD(CEMD) and bidimensional EMD(BEMD) are compared. The experimental results demonstrate that the new BEMD-based fusion method, proposed by this paper, can effectively produce a color fused image with the similar natural characteristics as the original color visible image and the quality of the fused image is the best.