A modified statistical approach for image fusion using wavelet transform

The fusion of images is an important technique within many disparate fields such as remote sensing, robotics and medical applications. For image fusion, selecting the required region from input images is a vital task. Recently, wavelet-based fusion techniques have been effectively used to integrate the perceptually important information generated by different imaging systems about the same scene. In this paper, a modified wavelet-based region level fusion algorithm for multi-spectral and multi-focus images is discussed. Here, the low frequency sub-bands are combined, not averaged, based on the edge information present in the high frequency sub-bands, so that the blur in fused image can be eliminated. The absolute mean and standard deviation of each image patch over 3 × 3 window in the high-frequency sub-bands are computed as activity measurement and are used to integrate the approximation band. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using the entropy, fusion symmetry and peak signal-to-noise ratio and is compared with recently published results. The experimental result proves that the proposed algorithm performs better in many applications.     

一种新的基于多尺度几何分析的图像融合方法

基于多尺度几何分析方法——非下采样轮廓波(Con tourlet)变换(NSCT)和Beamlet变 换,提出一种全新的医学图像融合方法。在进行NSCT分解后,在高频成分首先使用Beamlet 变换进行边缘检测, 然后根据聚类分割边缘密度的差值确定其系数的融合规则;对于低频成分,采用局部区域标 准方差系数的融合规则;经过 一致性校正后,通过对融合后的高频与低频子带系数进行逆NSCT得到重构图像。数值实验表 明,与传统的融合方法相 比较,本文方法能够有效减少噪声对融合图像的干扰,增强了融合的线性细节表达能力,提 高了信息量。     

A novel image fusion framework for night-vision navigation and surveillance

The night-vision image fusion plays a critical role in detecting targets and obstructions in low light or total darkness, which has great importance for pedestrian recognition, vehicle navigation, surveillance and monitoring applications. The central idea is to fuse low-light visible and infrared imagery into a single output. In this paper, we describe a new fusion framework for spatially registered visual and infrared images. The proposed framework utilizes the properties of fractal dimension and phase congruency in the non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. The proposed framework applies multiscale NSCT on visual and IR images to get low- and high-frequency bands. The varied frequency bands of the transformed images are then fused while exploiting their characteristics. Finally, the inverse NSCT is performed to get the fused image. The performance of the proposed framework is validated by extensive experiments on different scene imaginary, where the definite advantages are demonstrated subjectively and objectively.     

Fuzzy data fusion approach for image processing

The use of fuzzy set theory to combine the results of different image processing techniques is discussed, and it is shown how classical decision theory can be used to guide the choice of fuzzy methods to take account of observation inter-dependencies and risk in a meaningful way     

Perceptual quality assessment for multimodal medical image fusion

Recent years have witnessed that the multimodal medical image fusion (MMIF) plays critical roles in clinical diagnostics and treatment. Many MMIF algorithms have been proposed to improve the MMIF images quality. The quality of multimodal medical fused images will significantly affect the results of the clinical diagnosis. However, little work has been designed to evaluate the effectiveness of MMIF algorithms and the quality of MMIF images. To this end, this paper presents a perceptual quality assessment method for MMIF. A MMIF image database (MMIFID) is first built to employ the classical MMIF algorithms, and the subjective experiment is conducted to assess the quality of each fused image. Then, a no-reference objective method is proposed for the perceptual quality evaluation of MMIF images,which uses Pulse Coupled Neural Network (PCNN) in Non-subsampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT). A fused image is decomposed by NSCT into low frequency sub-band (LFS) and high frequency sub-band (HFS). It is used to motivate the PCNN processing, and large firing times are employed to measure LFS and HFS. Finally, two components evaluation results are combined to obtain the overall objective quality score. Experimental results based on the MMIFID indicate that our presented method outperforms the existing image fusion quality evaluation metrics, and it provides a satisfactory correlation with subjective scores, which shows effectiveness in the quality assessment of medical fused images.     

基于人工鱼群优化的自适应脉冲耦合神经网络图像融合

针对传统脉冲耦合神经网络(PCNN)图像融合算法中 最优融合结果无法自适应确定及神经元参数取固定常 数所造成的同步脉冲周期无法随图像特征改变的不足,提出了一种基于人工鱼群寻优的自适 应双通道 PCNN图像融合算法。利用合成空间雷达(SAR)图像的辐射分辨率和可见光图像的清晰度分别 作为双通道PCNN 对应神经元的链接强度值,PCNN的信号衰减常数、阈值放大系数和水平调节因子3个参数 采用人工鱼群 寻优,目标函数由互信息(MI)和结构相似度(SSIM)两种图像质量 评价指标构建,最终获得近似最优的融合图像。实验 结果表明,本文算法图像融合结果优于传统拉普拉斯变换、离散小波变换和参数取固定值的 PCNN图像融合算法及其一些改进算法。     

A novel region feature used in multisensor image fusion

A new region feature which emphasized the salience of target region and its neighbors is proposed. In region segmentation-based multisensor image fusion scheme, the presented feature can be extracted from each segmented region to determine the fusion weight. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed feature has extensive application scope and it provides much more information for each region. It can not only be used in image fusion but also be used in other image processing applications.     

A novel gray image representation using overlapping rectangular NAM and extended shading approach

In this paper, inspired by the idea of overlapping rectangular region coding of binary images, we extend the SDS design, which is based on overlapping representation from binary images to gray images based on the non-symmetry and anti-packing model (NAM). A novel gray image representation is proposed by using the overlapping rectangular NAM (RNAM) and the extended Gouraud shading approach, which is called ORNAM representation. Also, we present an ORNAM representation algorithm of gray images. The encoding and the decoding of the proposed algorithm can be performed in O(n log n) time and O(n) time, respectively, where n denotes the number of pixels in a gray image. The wrong decoding problem of the hybrid matrix R for the overlapping RNAM representation of gray images is solved by using the horizontal, vertical, and isolated matrices, i.e., H, V and I, respectively, which are used to identify the vertex types. Also, we put forward four criteria of anti-packing homogeneous blocks. In addition, by redefining a codeword set for the three vertices symbols, we also propose a new coordinate data compression procedure for coding the coordinates of all non-zone elements in the three matrices H, V and I. By taking some idiomatic standard gray images in the field of image processing as typical test objects, and by comparing our proposed ORNAM representation with the conventional S-Tree Coding (STC) representation, the experimental results in this paper show that the former has higher compression ratio and less number of homogeneous blocks than the latter whereas maintaining a satisfactory image quality, and therefore it is a better method to represent gray images.     

A novel binary operator for designing medical and natural image cryptosystems

Image cryptosystems aim to secure the transmission of images in the presence of adversaries in the network. For ensuring confidentiality, images are encrypted to form unintelligible cipher images, the algorithms of which are much different from those for text data. Most image cryptosystems follow confusion–diffusion or complex architectures, which involves permutation and substitution of pixel values. Often these are done using chaotic maps and involve binary operations such as bitwise XOR, addition–subtraction, DNA operations, etc., each of which has certain limitations. Most of the cryptosystems for medical images proposed in the literature encrypt 8-bit compressed versions of the images rather than the standard 16-bit DICOM version, which results in loss of information. This paper presents a novel binary operation that can be used for all types of image cryptosystems — from DICOM medical to natural images using both conventional and DNA approaches. The use of this operation has been tested on a proposed DNA-based cryptosystem, which has novel steps for encryption to overcome the drawbacks of some existing ones. The cryptosystem has been tested on several images of varying pixel depth and dimensions, and the results obtained meet the standards of a secured image encryption system.     

GrabCut image segmentation algorithm based on structure tensor

This paper attempts to present an interactive color natural images segmentation method. This method extracts the feature of images by using the nonlinear compact structure tensor (NCST) and then uses GrabCut method to obtain the segmentation. This method not only realizes the non-parametric fusion of texture information and color information, but also improves the efficiency of the calculation. Then, the improved GrabCut algorithm is used to evaluate the foreground target segmentation. In order to calculate the simplicity and efficiency, this paper also extends the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) constructed base on the GrabCut to the tensor space, and uses the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence instead of the usual Riemannian geometry. Lastly, an iteration convergence criterion is proposed to reduce the time of the iteration of GrabCut algorithm dramatically with satisfied segmentation accuracy. After conducting a large number of experiments on synthetic texture images and natural images, the results demonstrate that this method has a more accurate segmentation effect.     

A novel multi-focus image fusion algorithm based on random walks

In multi-focus image fusion, the aim is to create a single image where the whole scene is focused by fusing multiple images captured with different focus distances. The fused image has greater depth of field than each of the input images. In this paper, we present a new method for multi-focus image fusion via random walks on graphs. The proposed method first evaluates the focus areas in a local sense and identifies nodes corresponding to consistency of nodes in a global sense. Several popular feature sets based on focus measure and color consistency are evaluated and employed to create a fully connected graph to model the global and local characteristics, respectively, of the random walks. The behavior of random walks on the graph is utilized to compute the weighting factor for each of the shallow depth-of-field input image. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art techniques in both subjective and objective image quality measures.     

Adaptive region-based image fusion using energy evaluation model for fusion decision

A new adaptive region-based image fusion approach is proposed. To implement image segmentation, the piecewise smooth Mumford-Shah segmentation algorithm is studied and a fast and simple method is proposed to solve the energy function. Two complementary functions u ⁺ and u ⁻ of the algorithm, which are respectively looked as objects and background of the image, are extended into the whole image domain, and they are computed by linear or nonlinear diffusion. The key to the algorithm is to make optimal fusion decisions for every segmented region. For this purpose, an evaluation approach has to be given to measure the performances of the available fusion rules. Therefore an energy-based evaluation model, derived from the Total Variation principle, is proposed. By numerical experiment it has been demonstrated that despite an increase in complexity, the new approach has shown a number of advantages over previous ones, for example the ability to preserve all relevant information and remove some of side effects such as reducing contrast and sensitive to error of registration.     

A novel method for progressive image transmission using blocked wavelets

The techniques of progressive image transmission (PIT) divide image delivery into several phases. PIT's main objective is to efficiently and effectively provide an approximate reconstruction of the original image in each phase. Therefore, this study proposes the blocked wavelet progressive image transmission (BWPIT) method based on the wavelet transformation and the spatial similarity of pixels, to reduce the bit-rate and increase the image quality in an early phase of PIT. Experimental results show that the transmission bit-rate and the image quality of BWPIT are significantly better than those of bit-plane method (BPM), improved bit-plane method (IBPM), and wavelet-based progressive image transmission (WbPIT) method in each early phase.     

Multi-scale fusion residual encoder-decoder approach for low illumination image enhancement

The sensing light source of the line scan camera cannot be fully exposed in a low light environment due to the extremely small number of photons and high noise, which leads to a reduction in image quality. A multi-scale fusion residual encoder-decoder (FRED) was proposed to solve the problem. By directly learning the end-to-end mapping between light and dark images, FRED can enhance the image's brightness with the details and colors of the original image fully restored. A residual block (RB) was added to the network structure to increase feature diversity and speed up network training. Moreover, the addition of a dense context feature aggregation module (DCFAM) made up for the deficiency of spatial information in the deep network by aggregating the context's global multi-scale features. The experimental results show that the FRED is superior to most other algorithms in visual effect and quantitative evaluation of peak signa-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). For the factor that FRED can restore the brightness of images while representing the edge and color of the image effectively, a satisfactory visual quality is obtained under the enhancement of low-light.     

基于Contourlet变换的医学图像融合研究

介绍了对医学图像进行多分辨率、多方向分解的Contourlet变换。针对医学图像的特点,提出一种改进的中心区域能量加权平均融合规则。进行了不同Contourlet分解层次以及基于Con tourlet变换的不同融合规则的医学图像融合的仿真实验。结果表明,图像的质量有明显提高。     

Multimodal medical image fusion by cloud model theory

Image fusion can provide more extensive information since it combines two or more different images. Cloud model is a recently proposed theory in artificial intelligence and has the advantage of taking the randomness and fuzziness into account. In this paper, we introduce a novel multimodal medical image fusion method by cloud model theory. The proposed method fits the histograms of input images using the high-order spline function firstly and then divides intervals in line with the valley point of the fitted curve. On this basis, cloud models are generated adaptively through the reverse cloud generator. Finally, cloud reasoning rules are designed to achieve the fused image. Experimental results demonstrate that the fused images by proposed method show more image details and lesion regions than existing methods. The objective image quality assessment metrics on the fused images also show the superiority of the proposed method.     

A novel multi-focus image fusion method based on distributed compressed sensing

Multi-focus image fusion aims to produce an all-in-focus image by merging multiple partially focused images of the same scene. The main work is identifying the focused region and then composing all the focused regions. In this paper, a novel efficient multi-focus image fusion method based on distributed compressed sensing (DCS) is proposed. Firstly, the low-frequency and high-frequency images are obtained by comparing the variance of the source images, which are further utilized to get the low-frequency and high-frequency dictionaries. Secondly, DCS using joint sparsity model-1 (JSM-1) is applied to reconstruct the precise high-frequency images. Thirdly, the decision map is obtained based on all the high-frequency images and then improved by the morphological processing. Finally, the focused pixels are chosen from the source images through the decision map. Experimental results indicate that the proposed DCS-based method can be competitive with or even outperform some state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual and quantitative metric evaluations.     

A fuzzy logic approach to detect hotspots with NOAA/AVHRR image using multi-channel information fusion technique

This paper proposes a novel approach to detect hotspots using NOAA advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) for the Jharia, Jharkhand (India) region. Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand is the richest coal bearing area in India that contains a large number of mine fires which have been burning for several decades. In this paper, a fuzzy based methodology has been applied for the determination of hotspots to Jharia AVHRR images based on a theoretical model that establishes relationship among AVHRR channel 4, channel 5 and different vegetation indices. The algorithm consists of four stages: data preprocessing, multi-channel information fusion, hotspot detection using fuzzy logic approach and validation of result. The most commonly used existing algorithms like contextual algorithms, multi-thresholding, entropy based thresholding, and genetic algorithms have limitation that they need some mathematical model for training in order to get the required result. The employed fuzzy logic approach overcomes this requirement and in addition, it is flexible, tolerant of imprecise data and is based on natural language. The results were compared with the results obtained by ground survey and a good agreement has been obtained between observed and predicted hotspots.     

A novel fourth order chaotic system and its algorithm for medical image encryption

Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing - Today, medical imaging suffers from serious issues such as malicious tampering and privacy leakage. Encryption is an effective way to protect these...