A Novel Image Fusion Method Using Contourlet Transform

A novel image fusion algorithm based on contourlet transform is introduced. Firstly, the problem that wavelet transform could not efficiently represent the singularity of linear/curve in image processing is analyzed. The principal of contourlet and its good performance in expressing the singularity of two or higher dimensional are studied. Secondly, the feasibility of image fusion using contourlet transform is discussed in detail. A new fusion method based on contourlet transform and the fusion framework are proposed. Finally, the transform coefficients structure and the fusion procedure are given in detail in this paper. The fusion rules for each kind of coefficients are chosen based on the parameter n level. Especially for the high frequency components, the fusion rule of choosing the greater of the region energy with the region consistency check is proposed. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm works better in preserving the edge and texture information than wavelet transform method and Laplacian pyramid methods do in image fusion