Fusion of Multi-band SAR Images Based on Contourlet Transform

Aim at the fusion of multi-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, a new fused method using the contourlet transform is presented. Contourlet transform provides a flexible multiresolution, anisotropy and directional expansion for images. Compared with wavelets, it can afford more efficient presentation of image edges. This is employed for fusing the directional high- frequency coefficients. For the lowpass coefficients, an averaging fusion rule is used. For the directional high-frequency coefficients, the higher value of edge information measurement is used to select the better coefficients for fusion. The proposed method solves the problem of losing edge information for wavelet based fusion method. Finally, the example result of two bands SAR image fusion compared with wavelet fused method shows the vision effect and the statistical evaluation factors for fusion are both improved.