Multimodal Medical Image Fusion through a New DWT Based Technique

Medical image fusion can help physicians to extract the features that may not be normally visible in images by different modalities. In this paper, a novel discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based technique for medical image fusion is presented. Firstly, the medical images to be fused are decomposed by the DWT. Secondly, by considering the characteristics of human visual system (HVS) and the physical meaning of the wavelet coefficients, new different fusion schemes are performed on low frequency and high frequency bands separately followed by a window-based consistency verification. Finally, the fused image is constructed by the inverse DWT (IDWT) with all the combined coefficients. Experimental results on both simulated and real medical images can indicate that the proposed method is effective and provides a significant improvement over several conventional fusion methods.