Multifocus image fusion based on features contrast of multiscale products in nonsubsampled contourlet transform domain

Abstract In this paper, an efficient multifocus image fusion approach is proposed based on local features contrast of multiscale products in nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. In order to improve the robustness of the fusion algorithm to the noise and select the coefficients of the fused image properly, the multiscale products, which can distinguish edge structures from noise more effectively in NSCT domain, is developed and introduced into image fusion field. The selection principles of different subband coefficients obtained by the NSCT decomposition are discussed in detail. To improve the quality of the fused image, novel different local features contrast measurements, which are proved to be more suitable for human vision system and can extract more useful detail information from source images and inject them into the fused image, are developed and used to select coefficients from the clear parts of subimages to compose coefficients of fused images. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method performs very well in fusion both noisy and noise-free multifocus images, and outperform conventional methods in terms of both visual quality and objective evaluation criteria.