An Objective Quality Metric for Image Fusion based on Mutual Information and Muti-scale Structural Similarity

An objective image quality assessment method for image fusion based on mutual information and multi-scale structural similarity is presented. A simplified formula was deduced to compute the information amount transformed from the source images to the final fused image. With this formula we managed to resolve the overlapping information problem immediately and predigested the calculation extremely. Moreover we adopted the mutual information and the multi-scale structural similarity metric to image fusion schemes, and put forward a novel performance evaluation method without the interference of the reference image. Experimental results show that the proposed metric is well correlated with human subjective evaluations and thus can be used to distinguish the performance of different fusion methods.