Image fusion based on Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform and phase congruency

In this paper, a method for the fusion of IR and color images is proposed which can use both Non-Subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT) and combination of Haar wavelet transform and Unsharp filtering. We fuse images with combination of low level Haar Wavelet and Unsharp filtering instead of the input images. Moreover, image fusion is done in bandpass and lowpass subbands, which are obtained by NSCT. This work has three advantages over the use of single NSCT. Firstly the elapsed time decreases. Secondly, high frequency coefficients (i.e. high freq. wavelet images and bandpass subband NSCT images) can be fused twice. Finally, by applying unsharp filtering, the quality of reconstructed Wavelet image is enhanced and features based on combining Wavelet and NSCT are more effectively used. The obtained results show a better performance of the proposed method.