A Novel Geometric Dictionary Construction Approach for Sparse Representation Based Image Fusion

Sparse-representation based approaches have been integrated into image fusion methods in the past few years and show great performance in image fusion. Training an informative and compact dictionary is a key step for a sparsity-based image fusion method. However, it is difficult to balance “informative” and “compact”. In order to obtain sufficient information for sparse representation in dictionary construction, this paper classifies image patches from source images into different groups based on morphological similarities. Stochastic coordinate coding (SCC) is used to extract corresponding image-patch information for dictionary construction. According to the constructed dictionary, image patches of source images are converted to sparse coefficients by the simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit (SOMP) algorithm. At last, the sparse coefficients are fused by the Max-L1 fusion rule and inverted to a fused image. The comparison experimentations are simulated to evaluate the fused image in image features, information, structure similarity, and visual perception. The results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed image fusion solution.