Application of Statical Image Fusion in Medical Image Fusion

Image fusion provides a mechanism to combine two or more images into a single representation to aid human visual perception and image processing tasks. Such algorithms Endeavour to create a fused image containing the salient information from each source image, without introducing artifacts or inconsistencies. Image fusion is applicable for numerous fields including: defense systems, remote sensing and geosciences, robotics and industrial engineering, and medical imaging. In the medical imaging domain, image fusion may aid diagnosis and surgical planning tasks requiring the segmentation, feature extraction, and/or visualization of multi-modal datasets. This paper discusses the implementation of an image fusion toolkit built upon the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Based on an existing architecture, the proposed framework (GIFT) offers a 'plug-and-play' environment for the construction of n-D multi-scale image fusion methods.