Multi-focus Image Fusion Using an Effective Discrete Wavelet Transform Based Algorithm

In this paper, by considering the main objective of multi-focus image fusion and the physical meaning of wavelet coefficients, a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based fusion technique with a novel coefficients selection algorithm is presented. After the source images are decomposed by DWT, two different window-based fusion rules are separately employed to combine the low frequency and high frequency coefficients. In the method, the coefficients in the low frequency domain with maximum sharpness focus measure are selected as coefficients of the fused image, and a maximum neighboring energy based fusion scheme is proposed to select high frequency sub-bands coefficients. In order to guarantee the homogeneity of the resultant fused image, a consistency verification procedure is applied to the combined coefficients. The performance assessment of the proposed method was conducted in both synthetic and real multi-focus images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better visual quality and objective evaluation indexes than several existing fusion methods, thus being an effective multi-focus image fusion method.