Wavelet Transform with a New Selection Strategy for Image Fusion

In this paper, a novel image fusion algorithm based on wavelet transform is presented. The images to be fused are firstly decomposed into high frequency and low frequency bands. By considering the physical meaning of the coefficients, a new selection strategy that treats the coefficients in different ways is then developed. This strategy selects the coefficients of high frequency bands with a variance based scheme, while selects the coefficients of low frequency band with an edge based scheme. Finally, the fused image is constructed by an inverse wavelet transform performing on the combined coefficients from all frequency bands. The proposed method is validated and compared with some existing fusion methods. Experimental results can clearly indicate the superiority of the proposed method through visual inspection and objective fusion performance measurements.