Wavelet Transform with a Novel Integration Technique for Image Fusion

Image fusion is to combine several different source images to form a new image by using a certain method. Recent studies show that among a variety of image fusion algorithms, the wavelet-based method is more effective. In the wavelet-based method, the key technique is the fusion scheme, which can decide the final fused result. This paper presents a novel fusion scheme that integrates the wavelet decomposed coefficients in a quite separate way when fusing images. The method is formed by considering the different physical meanings of the coefficients in both the low frequency and high frequency bands. The fused results were compared with several existing fusion methods and evaluated by three measures of performance. The experimental results can demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performance than conventional image fusion methods.