Multiresolution DCT decomposition for multifocus image fusion

Image fusion is gaining momentum in the research community with the aim of combining all the important information from multiple images such that the fused image contains more accurate and comprehensive information than that contained in the individual images. In this paper, it is proposed to fuse multifocus images in the multiresolution DCT domain instead of the wavelet domain to reduce the computational complexity. The performance of the fused image in the proposed domain is compared with that of the wavelet domain with four recently-proposed fusion rules. The proposed method is applied on several pairs of multifocus images and the performance compared visually and quantitatively with that of wavelets. It is found that the performance of the proposed method is superior/similar to that of wavelets in terms of visual quality and quantitative parameters with extra benefits of computational efficiency and simplicity of implementation.