Multifocus image fusion and denoising scheme based on homogeneity similarity

A novel image fusion algorithm based on homogeneity similarity is proposed in this paper, aiming at solving the fusion problem of clean and noisy multifocus images. Firstly, the initial fused image is acquired with one multiresolution image fusion method. The pixels of the source images, which are similar to the corresponding initial fused image pixels, are considered to be located in the sharply focused regions. By this method, the initial focused regions are determined. In order to improve the fusion performance, morphological opening and closing are employed for post-processing. Secondly, the homogeneity similarity is introduced and used to fuse the clean and noisy multifocus images. Finally, the fused image is obtained by weighting the neighborhood pixels of the point of source images which are located at the focused region. Experimental results demonstrate that, for the clean multifocus image fusion, the proposed method performs better than some popular image fusion methods in both subjective and objective qualities. Furthermore, it can simultaneously resolve the image restoration and fusion problem when the source multifocus images are corrupted by the Gaussian white noise, and can also provide better performance than the conventional methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.