A modified statistical approach for image fusion using wavelet transform

The fusion of images is an important technique within many disparate fields such as remote sensing, robotics and medical applications. For image fusion, selecting the required region from input images is a vital task. Recently, wavelet-based fusion techniques have been effectively used to integrate the perceptually important information generated by different imaging systems about the same scene. In this paper, a modified wavelet-based region level fusion algorithm for multi-spectral and multi-focus images is discussed. Here, the low frequency sub-bands are combined, not averaged, based on the edge information present in the high frequency sub-bands, so that the blur in fused image can be eliminated. The absolute mean and standard deviation of each image patch over 3 x 3 window in the high-frequency sub-bands are computed as activity measurement and are used to integrate the approximation band. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the entropy, fusion symmetry and peak signal-to-noise ratio and is compared with recently published results. The experimental result proves that the proposed algorithm performs better in many applications.