Image fusion based on shearlet transform and regional features

In this paper, a new image fusion method is proposed based on the shearlet transform. In this method, to make the best use of the regional characteristics of the low frequency coefficients, the low frequency sub-band coefficients from different images are fused according to a rule based on regional energy. As for the high frequency sub-band coefficients, they are fused according to a novel rule upon comprehensive consideration of multiple regional features, such as regional variance, regional average gradient, regional spatial frequency. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm for image fusion outperforms traditional ones. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.